And the Hero Will Drown
by horsecrazy2
Summary: An attempt on Quistis Trepe's life plunges her into a world of conspiracy and betrayal. Quistis x Seifer
1. Prologue

**A/N: I've been thinking about this quite a bit and decided to add a note to the prologue explaining that the rest of the novel is not written in script form. I never really thought about it back when I first posted this, but there may be quite a few readers who skipped over this after reading the prologue and deciding they didn't want to slog through 200,000+ words of script. Only the interview was done in this manner--the rest is all in regular novel format. Hope that clears up any misconceptions.**

**Interview #1386, Conducted by Balamb Garden Headmaster Cid Kramer**

**Subject: Quistis Trepe**

**To Be Filed Under Official Report for Sorceress War, Marked 'Eyes Only'**

**Cid Kramer: **_We're recording now, Instructor Trepe. Please state your name and I.D. number for the record._

**Quistis Trepe: **_Quistis Trepe, I.D. number 835967231458300._

**Cid Kramer: **_Thank you. This is an official inquiry into the final events of the Trabian Battle, occurring nearly two years after the first Sorceress War. You were point leader of Squad A, which had infiltrated the town earlier under deep cover, Instructor Trepe. Correct?_

**Quistis Trepe: **_Correct…sir. Squad A and I took up residence at Trabia Garden under the guise of new cadets to investigate Balamb Garden's suspicions of espionage. Under your orders._

**Cid Kramer: **_The names of those comprising Squad A, please, Instructor Trepe._

**Quistis Trepe: **_Squad A was comprised under your orders, sir. You know-_

**Cid Kramer: **_For the record, please, Instructor Trepe. Quistis, please._

**Quistis Trepe: **_(Long pause.) Squad A was composed of myself, SeeD cadet Irvine Kinneas, SeeD cadet Selphie Tilmitt, SeeD cadet Zell Dincht, and…Seifer Almasy._

**Cid Kramer: **_Describe your conduct from time of contact with the enemy to the deaths of your squad mates._

**Quistis Trepe: **_(Long pause.) Squad A and myself were compromised while under cover. Seifer Almasy was captured and taken into custody. (Long pause.) …Cadet Dincht and I negotiated Seifer's safe return, while cadets Tilmitt and Kinneas radioed for backup. Which never came._

**Cid Kramer: **_Your mission was marked 'unsalvageable if compromised.' Your existence was to be denied. You were informed of this before accepting. _

**Quistis Trepe: **_We had uncovered massive amounts of politically-motivated betrayal on the part of Trabia Garden; we thought Balamb Garden may appreciate getting hold of the information they were willing to risk our lives to-_

**Cid Kramer: **_You retrieved Seifer Almasy, and engaged in a firefight with several cadets from Trabia Garden._

**Quistis Trepe: **_Correct…sir. We were fired upon first, and returned fire. Altercation took place in Classroom A13, during which time I was injured. Cadets Dincht, Tilmitt and Kinneas drew fire away while Seifer administered Curaga. Exits were sealed; we were vastly outnumbered. Someone threw a frag grenade into the melee, killing cadets Tilmitt and Dincht simultaneously. Cadet Kinneas was killed a few moments later, attempting to fight his way back to Seifer and I. Seifer…(Long pause. Sound of quickening breath.) Seifer threw himself in front of me and engaged several of the enemy. He took down approximately ten or so before they finally brought him down. I lingered in and out of consciousness at this time, and was presumed dead for awhile._

**Cid Kramer: **_Until unauthorized retrieval by Commander Leonhart. _

**Quistis Trepe: **_Yes. _

**Cid Kramer: **_Thank you, Instructor Trepe. Pending this ongoing investigation into the described events, you will be stripped again of your instructor's rank and restricted to Balamb Garden until this investigation has been carried out to the satisfaction of Trabia Garden, who have filed charges of treason against yourself and Commander Leonhart. Balamb Garden will cooperate to its fullest extent-_

**Quistis Trepe: **_In other words, you'll pretend my story is nothing but the mad ravings of a young woman placed under severe mental stress and consequently suffering a mental breakdown. We were sent in under Garden's _orders_. My fellow cadets gave their lives to-_

**Cid Kramer: **_This interview is terminated as of 1800 hours, on the date of September 14__th__, 2014 A.D._


	2. Chapter 1

A/N: This is my first FFVIII fanfiction, so please forgive any mistakes, and don't hesitate to point something out to me if I've got something wrong with the timeline/name of some place, etc. I don't know how fast I'll get updates out, as I'm pretty busy, but reviews do encourage me. ;)

Disclaimer: Squaresoft and the characters of FFVIII do not belong to me, yadda yadda, blah blah, or else I'd be a hell of a lot richer than I actually am.

**Chapter One**

Balamb Garden

8 Months Earlier

She was a solemn angel beneath the gentle glow of the library's dimmed lights, wreathed in the golden wisp of her hair. Soft and threaded through with a million threads of the palest flaxen, it hung like a waterfall of molten gold down her back, shiny like the exterior of a freshly-minted coin.

He watched her bend closer to the computer monitor casting her features in ghostly blue, and smiled at the image the young woman presented, scholarly and tight-assed as always, right down to the glasses tilted slightly askew across the slope of her pretty little nose. She tapped the eyewear back into place-everything had its proper place in Quistis Trepe's life-and the full lips flickered ever-so-slightly at the words that trickled across her screen.

The young man buried his smirk in the palm of one hand. _Chicken Wuss. _he guessed, skimming his gaze across the nearly deserted room and just grazing the spiked blonde tips of the library's only other inhabitant. The spikes wavered, tilted, and a head bobbed into view for a moment, a splash of black--forked tongues of ebony lightning--marring one cheek. Clean-shaven, of course; his attempts at cultivating facial hair had so far proved nothing more than a source of amusement for his friends. And enemies, as well. Because the young man felt pretty damn positive Chicken Wuss considered him lower than the tiny speckled bug currently making its way across one of his knuckles, and he'd poked more than his fair share of fun at the 'beard.' In fact, he recalled one particularly enjoyable experience where he'd held the whiny little brat down and scrawled a thick handlebar moustache across his upper lip…

Chicken Wuss appeared decidedly too jovial for his own good, the young man decided.

He slouched lower in his chair, drumming thoughtfully on the desk before him, returning his scheming attention momentarily to Quistis, back propped ramrod straight as always while she clattered away at her keyboard.

She was, he realized with some surprise, far too pretty to be a soldier. She was the last surviving rose of a harsh winter that poked tentative crimson petals into the bitter frost of a cold morning, surrounded by the brittle skeletons of her brethren.

The young man blinked. Where the hell had _that _come from? Perhaps he should go back to his dorm and take a nap rather than screwing with Chicken Wuss, if he was beginning to think in poetry. It was these lights, doing strange things to his eyesight, casting her in a more forgiving glow than the usual harsh fluorescence of her classroom. He hadn't set foot inside her classroom for over a year now--it reeked of far too many memories, sent him into a tailspin of remembrances that he had no desire to visit--but it was where she stayed, in his mind, forever the dogged instructor that refused to give up on him.

Seifer Almasy slid from his seat with a litheness surprising for his muscular young frame, and, waiting until the blonde spikes dipped behind their computer once more, got up and surreptitiously slipped into the chair beside Quistis.

**MadMartialArtist84: **quisty, i think i figured out what's going on.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: **You'll have to give me a little more information than that, Zell. And this account you registered in my name is completely inappropriate. It sounds like some kind of porn moniker.

**MadMartialArtist84: **aww, quis, it suits u. and i'm talking about the hot dogs, of course!!

**SexyBloneWaiting4U: **What if one of my students noticed that I was online, and instant messaged me with a question?

**MadMartialArtist84: **most of ur students are trepies anyway, quis. it'll help 'em show up to class on time, guarantee. and ur not listening to my theory.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: ***sighs* About the hot dogs? What is it this time? The cafeteria ran out because extraterrestrial clones of Irvine have landed in Balamb and set up base near Garden so that they have ready access to our supply of lunch food, and are undergoing strict training to seduce the lunch ladies and persuade them to hand over the day's entire stockpile of hot dogs?

**MadMartialArtist84: **u never pay attention. that was last week's theory!! no, this time i'm pretty sure i've got 'em; there's a giant vacuum cleaner that they keep in the basement level of garden, right?

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: ***sighs*

**MadMartialArtist84: **u with me, quis?

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: **I doubt that the right half of your brain is with the left half of your brain. **delete **Yes, Zell. Please continue. I find your theories of hot dog theft, aliens and giant vacuum cleaners utterly fascinating.

**MadMartialArtist84: **hey! i'm detecting sarcasm.

Quistis felt the slight waft of his presence stir the heavy blanket of her hair against her neck, and knew without turning her head who slid into the seat beside her. She'd noticed him earlier, but getting no response other than a noncommittal grunt to her aloof 'Hello Seifer,' she hadn't bothered in pursuing any attempt at conversation with him. It surprised her a little that he joined her now; then again, glancing coolly at the dangerous mirth lighting a sparkling fire in his eyes, she realized that this was yet another of his efforts to start trouble. That at least didn't surprise her at all; even with shadows buried behind his usual cockiness, internal scars he'd picked up from the Sorceress War, he'd never quite lost his grip on the bullying arrogance that made him Seifer Almasy.

"Can I help you, Seifer?" Quistis asked, her tone a little more chilly than she'd intended. Oh well. She would hardly hurt his feelings, and better to let him know how little she appreciated his presence. Not that that would help. In fact, knowing Seifer, the knowledge that he had made himself an annoyance would probably only cement his decision to stay.

Sure enough, he smirked at her, threaded both hands behind his head, and propped his boots smugly on the computer desk. "Just wanted to say 'hi' to my favorite instructor."

"I'm no longer your instructor, and the library is not your personal stomping ground. Take your feet down."

He kept them right where they were, and, unlacing his fingers, darted one hand forward to type out a brief message, which she perused for a moment, shook her head, and moved to delete. Seifer batted her hand playfully away, and smacked the enter button hard with the pads of his fingers.

**MadMartialArtist84: **it's ok, quis, i forgive u. anyway, like i was sayin,' there's this giant vacuum cleaner in the basement level, 'cause there's a colony of hobos living there, right? and they're a hot dog worshiping hobo colony, so every night they turn on the vacuum cleaner, which is attached directly to the air vents in the cafeteria, and wham!! they suck the hot dogs up into the air vents and into the vacuum cleaner, so the next morning there aren't any left.

**SexyBlondWaiting4U: **Zell, I want your body. Every night I touch myself thinking about you.

"Don't you have something better to do, Seifer? I would imagine sleep would appeal more to even you than typing out immature messages disguised as someone who was just hoping to do a little research for a seminar tomorrow."

Seifer cracked his knuckles and hunched forward, blocking her from the keyboard. "Nah. I don't sleep much, and staring at the ceiling gets boring after awhile. 'Sides, I haven't fucked with Chicken Wuss in a while. It'll be fun to watch him shit himself."

"You must be hard up if you have to resort to cybering with Zell." Quistis said mildly, concealing the combination of amusement and irritation that dragged its warm tendrils across her skin. The ghost of a smile that flitted across her mouth tinged the icy blue eyes with the warmth of hidden laughter, bright as sunlight breaking through a stormy cloud bank.

"Tch. Dincht will thank me. This will probably be the most action he'll get…ever."

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: **I've been practicing my flying lotus blossom yoga, and I can bend myself into the most interesting positions. I think of you when I do them, and oh God, I want you so bad, shoving your tiny little dick so deep-

Quistis ripped his hands from the keys and reached hastily for the delete button, thwarted in her efforts by Seifer's large palms, keeping her at bay with an ease that pissed her off. "That's _not _what the library computers are supposed to be used for!" she hissed.

"Relax, _Instructor_. I know it's a bit crude right now, but don't worry, I'll get into all that erotic poetic shit that I know you probably sit up at night reading under your covers."

She flushed a startling shade of pink, and he wondered with great interest if he had actually stumbled on some dirty little secret of the perpetually dowdy young woman. Perhaps she _did _occasionallyloosen that stick up her ass enough to enjoy herself…

"Oh Chicken Wuss," Seifer whispered to her, "You moan like a tiger in my ear and I can feel the flower of my womanhood opening up to you. You are like water to my shriveled libido, the fire to melt my ice-" He broke into snickers.

Quistis stared down her pert nose at him, regarding the young man with what he liked to think of as her best 'teacher look,' the kind that inspired even the most unenthusiastic of students to scramble to finish their homework. Well, except him of course; he'd always managed to dodge those icy little missiles that seemed to drill straight from her penetrating gaze through the skull of whoever disappointed her, parrying her scholarly concern with his own nonchalance, always one step ahead, the naughty child pursued by its haggard mother across a busy playground.

Strangely enough, he realized now that he'd somewhat missed these little exchanges. He hadn't entered into a battle of wits (or stubborness, really,) with a worthwhile opponent in longer than he could remember. Quistis and her little clique steered clear of him for the most part, (not that he could blame them considering their history--he'd only tried to kill them what, three, four times?) only Quistis ever making any amiable effort to talk to him. Oh sure, he interacted with the others occasionally, but they were interactions far from cordial.

Quistis stared tight-lipped at him--Seifer couldn't tell if she had finally entered into genuine anger, bypassing annoyance to the beginning flame of rage, or if she might actually be trying to suppress laughter.

He cracked his knuckles once more, and set back to work.

"Zell," he read aloud, pursing his lips exaggeratedly around the name as it fell from his mouth, his smirk digging a hole into one cheek while he listened for the martial artist's stunned gasps. "I'm not wearing any panties--a quickie in the library has always been my sexiest fantasy."

Zell Dincht knew his friends loved him for his often entertaining off-the-wall energy and almost childlike naivety--he didn't mind being considered the naïve one of the group, because, in all honesty, he did at times find himself the last one to catch onto something. Not due to stupidity, just a simple innocence he'd never quite outgrown during all of his nineteen years. It cast the world around him into contrasting hues of black and white, right and wrong, a simplistic view that he sometimes wished others could share. The burden of the gray area between good and bad pressed too heavily on even the strongest of shoulders at times, Zell felt.

However, he wasn't _this _naïve.

Straight-laced, honest and slightly prudish Quistis Trepe did not talk this way. She had never demonstrated anything but sisterly affection toward him, and even if she had subtly expressed some desire to bring their friendship to the next level, she would not proposition him for a quickie in a public room that anyone might enter at any moment in time.

He scratched idly at the nape of his neck, the flesh of his brow furrowing, puckering under a few wispy bangs that had managed to escape the fair hair scattered in wild disarray above his forehead. _Did someone hack her account? _

**MadMartialArtist84: **uh, quis, u feelin' all right? what's goin' on?

He drummed his fingers lightly on one thigh, frowning down onto his computer monitor, as though it might unravel this mystery for him if only he stared at it for long enough.

Unfortunately, it offered nothing more than a particularly dirty invitation from his friend that flapped his mouth open, gaping loosely in astonishment at the graphic description, involving a sexual position he hadn't even been aware existed until this moment.

Zell whipped his head out from behind the computer to catch a glimpse of her. He caught a flash of blonde, glittering yellow in the room's muted illumination, a glossy shimmer across his irises. No--_two _blonde flashes. Someone had joined her.

He knew of only one other person at Garden with that same shade of hair that would mind fuck him this way, and felt the tense clench of his fists in their ever-present gloves.

"Hey!" Zell snapped loudly. "I see you, Alm_ass_y!"

The librarian, shelving books nearby with the quiet thunk of cardboard and paper, shushed him with an irritated frown.

He half-rose from his chair, his instant message window beeping insistently at him as it flashed a new message.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: **Chicken Wuss.

**MadMartialArtist84: **shut the hell up, asshole.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: **Not jacking off over there, are you?

**MadMartialArtist84: **i'm gonna' kill him, quis. u won't tell, right? and it's not like anyone'll miss him.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: **LMAO! You couldn't punch your way out of a wet paper bag, numbfuck.

**MadMartialArtist84: **u little shit--put quis back on.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: **She's busy right now. I knew you weren't man enough to indulge her little fantasy, so I'm taking care of it for her. *as Quistis* Oh Seifer, just like that…I can't believe I ever would have considered Zell over a real man like you…

**MadMartialArtist84: **asshole. PUT. QUISTIS. ON.

Seifer threw back his head and laughed heartily. He could practically hear Dincht's elevated breathing all the way on the other side of the room; if death gazes could form tangible objects of the sharp variety, he would find himself skewered straight through the heart. In fact, he could feel the martial artist's beady little eyes on him now, narrowed with as much hatred as he'd ever seen on that boyish face, the normally exasperatingly cheerful features twisted with rage.

Zell's quick temper had always amused him; even as a child he'd known precisely which buttons to push to irk the other young man.

He waved and smiled.

Beside him, Quistis began gathering up a stack of paperwork she'd left sitting on the desk, the glasses slipping a little on her nose again, slightly off-center until she pressed them back into position once more. He wondered for a brief moment if she could still function normally with the lovingly battered spectacles sitting just the tiniest bit awry on her face, or if even that small loss of order would throw Quistis Trepe's entire existence out of whack.

He bet she fucking organized her clothing according to color and material.

"Leaving me already, Instructor?"

"As much as I enjoy your company, Seifer," Quistis replied, the timbre of her voice darkening toward sarcasm, "it's almost ten, and I'd like to get some sleep. You can keep trying to romance Zell if you like, but I don't really have any interest in your latest conquests."

"Careful walking back to your dorm." he offered with false concern. "Probably Trepies lurking in the night waiting to sniff your hair."

"Thank you." she responded frostily. "I think I can manage."

She swept out without another word, leaving behind a trailing strand of fragrance that curled up his nostrils to hibernate there, implanting the scent of her hair in his memory. Peaches, he thought, mixed with something else he couldn't quite identify, but liked.

Seifer watched her leave for a moment.

Knockout body beneath her slightly bookish exterior, pretty face, and enough fire behind that icy gaze to interest anyone brave enough to go looking for it--he might have indulged in a few fantasies regarding the enigmatic miss Trepe despite the fact that she was a bit too prim for his usual tastes, if the prospect of pissing off Chicken Wuss hadn't beckoned so enticingly to him.

He saw the martial artist rising from his chair out of the corner of one eye, and smirked in anticipation.

"Almassy, you little-" the tattooed blonde spat, making a lunge for him with fists extended while Seifer remained casually in place, boots resting atop the computer desk once more, the very picture of blasé detachment. He watched with a distant sort of amusement as Zell caught a foot in a snarl of computer cables coiling like a motionless snake's nest on the floor, and pitched forward with a startled yelp, sending several chairs crashing in all directions.

The librarian glared at both young men. "I think the two of you better remove yourselves and return to your dorms--it's almost after hours anyway. Being a war hero does _not _excuse you from curfew." she lectured the swearing Zell, his face painted in the ruddy glow of anger and humiliation, the flush of color retreating to a soft rose petal ember in his cheeks as he tried to bring himself under control.

Seifer, tipping his chair back on two legs as he gave the older woman a charming smirk, righted the piece of furniture once more and leaned forward, slapping his hands on both knees. "That color suits you, Chicken Wuss."

Zell growled menacingly.

"Mr. Dincht!" the woman warned, the sharpness of her tone detracting from the somewhat grandmotherly appearance lent her by the silver hair and small spectacles perched at the end of her nose. "Please leave my library."

Seifer, already on his way out the door now, heard Zell heave himself to both feet, and, smiling to himself, slipped into the deserted hall beyond, the young man's thundering footsteps erupting right behind him just a moment later.

He kept walking.

"Hey! Get back here, Seifer! Too scared to fight me? Who's the Chicken Wuss now? Huh?"

"Hit a nerve back there didn't I, Chicken Wuss? You must be president of the Trepie Fan Club. You know, she's hot, I'll give you that, but the woman's so damn cold you'd probably freeze it off if you got involved with her." Seifer mused.

"Don't talk about Quistis like that, you piece of shit!"

He ignored that and veered off through a pair of double doors into the fresh sweetness of a balmy spring night, a slight breeze ruffling the shining gold of his hair, caressing it in gentle fingers, a softer touch than he'd ever known. The abrupt slam of the doors behind him cut Zell's tirade off mid-sentence, shutting him off into a world where only the far-off buzzing of lazy insects dared penetrate the easy quiet.

He liked that. Too often, he found his surroundings impossibly noisy, unbearably loud, strung through his ears like wire, cutting and painful and intrusive. The chatter of students making their way to class, the crackling squawk of the loudspeaker, Raijin's booming commentary on the size of some new student's breasts…they wrapped him in a cocoon of chaos from which he couldn't escape, dragged like nails on a chalkboard across his psyche. It reminded him too much of the incessant murmurs whispering through his head during his reign as the Sorceress' Knight, sibilant and horrible as they raped him of his free will.

To be a prisoner in one's own mind was the worst sort of torment you could inflict on a man.

Seifer sauntered down the paved walkway toward his own dorm room--apparently Chicken Wuss really was all bark and no bite, as he hadn't followed the taller young man to continue their 'conversation.' Or else he'd become distracted by something shiny, an all-too possible explanation of the man's absence. He imagined a Malboro on drugs probably contained less hyperactive energy beneath its skin than Zell Dincht.

As he walked, his mind flashed briefly back to an image of Quistis hunched over her computer, trailing a few long silken strands of hair onto its keys. She never had made much fucking sense to him, even as a child, and so--perhaps as punishment for confusing him--he'd perfected the art of getting a rise out of her, one he persisted in even now, years later. As her student he'd pushed her to the very limit, trying even the deep well of her patience, challenging her authority at every opportunity presented to him.

Yet somehow, she'd never seemed to give up on him. Even with the end of the war, when everyone else had screamed for his blood, when countless numbers of people demanded his execution, she had argued in favor of pardoning him. True, he hadn't been entirely in control of himself, a puppet dancing on its strings at the deft pluck of its master's fingers, but he hadn't expected her to understand that, or even care.

Instead, she'd actually proved instrumental in freeing him. Without her influence, he would have in all probability faced the firing squad almost a year ago.

Seifer didn't understand that at all; she didn't like him, he could see it in the frosty glaze of that icy cerulean gaze whenever she addressed him. She was politely courteous to him, but never with any real warmth. Why then, had she decided to save him? And why could he still not find it in himself to show even a hint of gratitude toward her for it?

_Maybe, _a mocking voice at the back of his mind said, _because you're not sure you should have been spared. Maybe because you're not sure she did anyone a favor by unleashing you on the world again. _

His boots thudded briskly against the pavement underfoot. The sound swelled in his ears, a hollow match to the resigned drumming of his heart. That was how he felt some days--that the beating of his heart wrapped in its frail bone cage was merely a convenience, just thundering along because that was what it was supposed to do, not because there was any real reason for him to keep on living. He didn't serve much of a purpose--Seifer didn't need his most vocal adversaries to tell him that. A failure as a SeeD, a man with far more enemies than friends, possessing nothing more than the tattered old trench coat he still wore like some sort of fucking security blanket and the lethal Hyperion. A complete fucking wash up at twenty years of age.

Perhaps that in itself was his accomplishment. A small smile tugged at the young man's lips. After all, how many people could claim they'd completely screwed over not only themselves but hundreds of others as well after only two decades of life?

Something rustled in the bushes off to his right; he spun, instantly alert, a dog with its hackles raised. The scamper of a small rodent across the pathway in front of him relaxed taut muscles a moment later, and he continued onward, reaching his dorm building and shouldering one heavy door aside.

Inside, he stood with his back pressed to the entrance's cool glass for a moment, reflecting on his options. Sleep brushed saccharine fingers across his eyelids, but it was only a light touch, tentative, and one he easily thrust aside. He didn't want to retreat to his cold, empty room, with the shadows of his mind just waiting for him to drift off into slumber so they could pry relentlessly at the edges of his sanity. Like fucking crow bars, tearing pieces of wood from a boarded-up window to shine sunlight's bright radiance into the black depths of his shriveled soul. Only, he didn't think it was sunlight waiting to seep through the perforations his memories created, but rather an oily blackness that he could sometimes sense lurking somewhere deep inside him. It frightened him, as much as anything had ever frightened Seifer Almasy, and few things had ever genuinely scared the brash young man.

He was not yet ready to face those shadows again.

He pivoted, slapped the door open, and emerged gratefully back into the pleasant night.

Quistis felt something amiss as she retrieved the papers she'd dropped from where they lay scattered at her polished footwear. It was a wrongness to the atmosphere itself, a distinct sense of peril that screamed raucously, warning bells in her soldier's mind.

She stopped gathering her work into slender fingers, and straightened slowly, uncomfortably aware that she'd left Save the Queen looped in a usless spiral on top of her bed.

Her eyes darted to the roof overhead, a simple wooden sheath stretching the length of the walkway, sheltering those walking beneath its pitted exterior from the chilling downpours that often occurred this time of year. It creaked, as though beneath some soft footfall, and a dark wisp of something snapped briefly at the edge of her vision, swept away in the wind's insistent grasp a moment later.

_Someone's on the roof. _

The thought entered her mind only a split second before that someone swung lightly down onto waiting pavement, lithe and effortlessly graceful, clad entirely in black, blending almost seamlessly with the night itself. Broad-shouldered and leanly muscular beneath the ebony garments, their face shielded by a mask in the same color, they regarded her for just a moment through slits that revealed a calculating blue gaze.

Then, even before her wary mind registered movement, the figure stood directly in front of her.

She recovered quickly, hissing as a white-hot line of pain razored down her left arm, shredding the sleeve of her top, an incision slashed through clothing and flesh alike by the sharp blade he darted at her. Twisting away from the attack, Quistis slammed her elbow into the man's side as she whirled past him, following the motion through until she was behind him, positioned perfectly for a painful kidney shot.

She took it, slamming her boot into his flesh without enough force to make him piss blood for a week.

He grunted, and staggered forward a little, but showed no other reaction. She might have flicked him upside the head with a finger for all the agony he revealed.

_Shit!_

His arm flicked out once again, a sleek and deadly blur under night's concealing cloak, nipping mockingly at her vulnerable flesh. Quistis just barely rolled beneath the attack, delivering a brutal right hook to his sternum, driving deep with all the considerable strength in her agile body.

The man's throat convulsed around a ragged cough, jerking him a little with the force of its emergence--and the knife plunged down, moonlight skipping along its lethal surface, a shaft of silver to rival even the vivid gray of those moonbeams.

She was going to die.

Quistis tasted the knowledge against her tongue, bitter and searing and awful, hot like the fires of hell against the roof of her mouth.

_No!_

She was a high-ranking SeeD, dammit, a deadly mercenary to be reckoned with, a capable soldier who'd trained in the art of battle since the tender young age of eleven. Her kind went out in a blaze of glory on some foreign battle field, brought down after a glorious fight that raged on and on, stopped only by a barrage of bullets that filled them from head to toe. They did not pass silently into Death's waiting hands after a stealth attack from a stranger in the dead of night.

The blue gaze flamed, the frost of it melting beneath the blaze of indignant anger. Fuck this man; if he wished to take her from this life prematurely, before she'd accomplished all she wanted to, then he was going down with her, or at least wouldn't be walking away from the fight.

Papers bloomed upward, like dandelion puffs spiraling into the creamy vapor of a perfect summer afternoon, jostled by her boots as she struggled for the upper hand. The same line of pain that prickled along her arm burned now at her scalp, superficial but searing. She grabbed for an arm, caught it, and twisted it hard behind his back, his fingers unclenching involuntarily, the knife clattering at her feet. She slammed him into a thin wooden pillar supporting the roof overhead, the entire structure emitting an ominous creak.

He bucked powerfully in her grip, smashing a foot backward, catching her in one knee and buckling the leg.

Quistis fell, bruising her leg against the hard ground, the fragrant silk of her hair leaping forward to conceal flushed cheeks as her head dipped, almost as though she were bowing in deference to him.

Its thunder swelled ripely in her ears.

The noise slithered into an ear, reverberating around inside her skull, a rubber ball tossed gleefully against the side of a building by a small child. It played on an endless loop, coiling around her mind like the slender thread of smoke that plumed from the black snout looming so close to her.

She saw the man wobble, saw the gun in his hands fall, saw it strike the cool pavement as he folded forward onto his knees. The glint of something protruding from his chest caught her eye, drew her hazy attention momentarily away from the throbbing pain that had begun to envelop her body.

She recognized the scarred handle, scratched and blemished from years of harsh use, winking knowingly at her in the moonlight, not unlike the gun blade's cocky owner.

_Hyperion. _

Her combative, harassing little smart ass of a student had reversed their roles finally. A year after she had argued against his execution, he had saved her.

The blood rushed harder, faster in her ears.

_Only problem is, I think he came too late. _

The ground swirled up to meet Quistis as the sky sparked above her, a million stars flung across a sheet of black, diamond dust against a more plain backdrop. They dazzled her eyes, spiraling around her, through her, until she could only lie back and close her eyes peacefully, lest she find herself drawn right up into the sky with them.

He touched her face, his hand burning like a coal freshly retrieved from a fire against her cheek. "Shit. Trepe, don't go to sleep on me. Quistis? Open your fucking eyes."

_Scared. _Quistis thought fuzzily. He sounded a little scared. She heard the small yet distinct note of concern in his voice, and wondered with a strange sort of amusement if she'd ever heard Seifer Almasy sound worried. She supposed she ought to worry herself, if his voice of all people's had lost its arrogant tone.

She couldn't bring herself to care somehow. The pain had begun to ease, and the stars danced even behind her closed eyelids, twirling before her in a graceful ballet, dragging Quistis with them into a brightness that dulled when she reached out to touch it, plunging her into the cool blackness of permanent sleep.


	3. Chapter 2

**A/N: **Chapter two for you guys. Reviews appreciated.

**Disclaimer: **Still don't own anything, and I think that's unlikely to change.

**Chapter Two**

Infirmary

Balamb Garden

Seifer had seen his fair share of blood throughout his life--he was a soldier after all, and a reckless one at that, the kind that started fights just for the satisfaction of feeling the give of bone and cartilage beneath his fists.

But _her _blood, the sight of Quistis' life--shiny and strangely beautiful, damp rubies against his fingertips--emptying from her limp body somehow scared the living shit out of him. He supposed it was the shock of seeing such an untouchable woman lying injured and vulnerable in his arms that frightened him--his arms, of all people's, ones built only for destruction, out of place cradling that oddly innocent face, so incongruous on a woman of her profession.

The sonorous beep of the machine counting out each beat of her life rang in his ears.

Heavy, stilted, it whispered promises of death to him in a voice that sounded vaguely like _hers_, the voice of the kindly Matron, and yet not, the raven-haired woman buried somewhere behind the bubbling madness of the sorceress. It was a voice that had ripped steadily away at his sanity, a determined finger flaking away at the pink crust of scar tissue.

He remembered that voice now; he usually only heard it in his dreams, in the darkest part of night when he had sunk too deeply into slumber to slam his defenses into place. Grating and horrible, it smirked at his helplessness, and tauntingly reminded him of the blood beneath his fingertips.

Seifer lifted both hands to his eyes, studying them with as much detachment as he could muster. Tipped with the peeling remnants of her life fluid, dried from that vivid red to a more lackluster mahogany, they trembled slightly. He watched his fingers twitch, in spastic little jerks that seemed to belong to someone else. Seifer Almasy did not tremble when confronted with death. Seifer Almasy laughed, mirth that boiled on his tongue and spilled through his lips to wrap around the throat of his victim, an invisible garrote that stripped them of their bravery more even than the pressure of Hyperion's glittering tip against their skin.

He had laughed plenty when under her control. He did not do so now. He felt like throwing up, bleeding himself dry of the nausea that twisted inside him like a living thing. Bleeding himself, the same way she had bled, out onto the walkway around them both, a crimson oil slick that stained the knees of his pants.

God, her blood--so much of it--he was fucking _covered _in it. All of the water in Garden couldn't completely wash it free of him ever again.

"Seifer." A gentle hand settled on his shoulder.

He jerked away from it, glaring viciously from beneath lowered eyebrows, heavy with the thunderous look he sent toward Dr. Kadowaki.

"She'll be all right. She lost a lot of blood; the bullet nicked an artery in her shoulder, but I've patched that up, and the knife wounds are shallow. You got to her in time."

_"You got to her in time." _

He almost chuckled at that. Since when had he ever 'gotten to' _anything _on time in his life? He had spent twenty years avoiding that 'anything,' particularly if avoiding it meant pissing someone off. Seifer Almasy worked on his own time table, and no one else's. Interesting that it had been Quistis Trepe, the queen of punctuality herself, whom he'd shown up for right in time.

"I think you should go get some sleep now, Seifer." the doctor told him gently. "It's 3:00 in the morning."

"Not tired." he said brusquely. That wasn't entirely true--he could feel the weight of sleep pressing insistently at him, feeling along his entire body for any cracks in his obstinance, but he couldn't submit to that insistence, not now. Not with _her _voice flaying his eardrums with such terrible force that he expected to feel the drip of liquid from his ear canal.

"I promise you she'll be all right." the older woman assured him, smiling gently, mis-interpreting the reasoning behind his stubborness. Let her assume--fuck if he was going to tell her the real reason he feared crawling back into the stagnant chill of his bed. "She's out of danger; I'll watch her vitals, make sure everything's fine."

"I said I'm not tired." he barked, crossing both arms mulishly across his chest.

"All right then--I've already called Headmaster Cid to tell him there was an attack on Quistis, and if you're not leaving, then I'll just let him know he can be by for your official report."

Seifer looked disinterestedly down at his hands, linked now in his lap to try and still the irritating shaking that persisted. "I already told you everything that happened. I just walked into the middle of some asshole trying to shoot Quistis, and threw my gun blade at him. Not much to tell."

"Still, Cid will want to hear it from you." she said firmly, retrieving the phone from its cradle on the far wall and punching in a couple of numbers.

He watched the doctor retreat into her office through narrowed eyes. He knew what would follow--endless questioning, despite the fact that he honestly couldn't contribute much to this 'report,' a never-ending flow of paperwork, and the unsubtle suspicion in people's eyes that he was to blame for the current state of Garden's golden girl, naked hostility transparent as glass.

Seifer glowered at the sleeping Quistis, serene in her drug-induced slumber. _Wipe that fucking smile off your lips. _he thought angrily.

He wasn't genuinely angry at her, of course--just envious that she could rest so peacefully while he was plagued with unending nightmares. Hardly seemed fair. Of course, she hadn't acquired the same inner demons he'd managed to obtain, eating away at him like some malignant cancer, sliding venomous fingers into the fractured pieces of his battered psyche. Consequently, he bet Trepe didn't expect to find the flickering pits of hell contemplating her through empty eye sockets every time she glanced in a fucking mirror.

Dr. Kadowaki entered the main room quietly, carrying the phone in one dusky-fleshed hand, its lights dimmed to muted glows, indicating its 'off' status. She returned it to its resting place, made a couple of notes on the clipboard she carried in her left hand, then looked expectantly at him. "Cid will be here in a few moments to take your statement."

"Can't wait." he replied without bothering to conceal his sarcasm.

The woman clicked her tongue, shook her head disparagingly at him, then leaned over to fiddle with Quistis' I.V. line.

The door hissed almost angrily aside, turning both their heads in surprise, Seifer halfway out of his chair until he identified the streak that barreled crazily into the small infirmary. Hyperion swung against his hip with the abrupt movement, the clank of steel on steel whirling the streak around to face him, anger blazing bright and throbbing in his cheeks and the cold steel of blue eyes.

Chicken Wuss, with Puberty Boy stepping grimly up behind him to join the party, his dark brow arranged into severe lines even for Squall.

Seifer tensed--he could sense a fight coming from a long way off, and these two fairly reeked of righteous fury.

"You killed her!" Zell screamed, and launched himself for the other young man in a blind rage, upending a cart of medical supplies, needles and rolls of gauze exploding haphazardly into the air, clinking almost melodically off the walls to either side. "Fuck you, Almasy, you worthless piece of shit! What the hell did Quistis ever do to you?"

Seifer dodged the man's tackle, leaving Zell to slam headfirst into the wall behind him, his cry of rage shatteringly painful to Seifer's ears. Pissed himself now--Chicken Wuss had no right to attack him, not after he'd saved Trepe's ass--Seifer latched onto Hyperion's handle, the blade singing half-free from his belt before he felt the sharp prickle of icy steel at his throat, caressing the Adam's apple with an almost loving faintness.

Gray eyes, hard as granite and nowhere near as sympathetic, stared him down from beneath a fringe of dark bangs.

Squall's scar, a twin of the rough pucker of his own mark, appeared slightly inflamed, more scarlet than its usual faint pink, as though he'd scrubbed hard at it in thought. Seifer concentrated on the snaking line interrupting otherwise smooth flesh, red like Quistis' blood, expanding in his vision like the spreading pool beneath her, lapping over the tips of his boots as he tried to hold it inside her with only the pressure of his hands.

"Get that off me, Leonhart." he snarled at last, reaching out to curl a hand around the gun blade's razor edge, uncaring of the sharp bite of pain in the meat of his palm, the same red blooming against his own flesh now as he slapped Squall's weapon angrily away. Crimson droplets surged down the muscular length of his forearm, dripping frantically from the deep laceration, like spilled wine knocked over in a fit of rage to stain an immaculate carpet.

Zell charged him from behind, driving a shoulder hard into Seifer's spine, staggering him forward against Quistis' bed, her I.V. line dancing erratically with the contact.

The world churned to crimson before Seifer, thick overlaid by filmy red, his surroundings cast in bloody vibrancy by the power of his own fury.

"You little fuck, I didn't touch her!" he snapped, swinging hard, the punch carrying the full force of his anger. It grazed Zell's nose as he ducked beneath the attack, not quite fast enough to entirely avoid it, a scarlet gush erupting instantly from his nostrils. The pain infuriated him further, and he dove for the ex-knight's throat, grasping the pale neck in a vicious chokehold that brought Seifer to both knees, the expletive he blurted at the enraged young man abruptly severed.

"Both of you, get off him!" Dr. Kadowaki screamed, wading into the thick of things, elbowing Squall out of her way and fisting a hand in Zell's shirt. She heaved mightily, but even the sudden surge of adrenaline couldn't separate the martial artist from his prey, and Zell's grasp failed to slacken. "This is how you thank him for saving your friend? You're acting like children; Zell Dincht, get off him this instance!"

"He didn't save Quistis." Squall interjected, standing back from the action now, coldly serious as always, arms folded severely across his chest.

"She was attacked and Seifer intervened-"

"There was no body where Seifer claimed she was attacked. We didn't find anything except a lot of blood--and there was only one pool of that, presumably from Quistis."

"He's innocent until proven guilty." the doctor insisted tightly, grabbing again for Zell.

A cry of rage bellowed through the small room, resounding off utilitarian walls, singing painfully in the dark-haired young man's ears, like the furious ululation of some wounded animal. Zell flew several feet through the air to crash forcefully into the wall behind him, and the ex-knight surged to both feet, a rabid dog backed into a corner by tormenting children, prepared to lash out with all the pent-up rage tucked beyond deadly claws and snapping fangs.

There was murder in the boy's eyes, Dr. Kadowaki realized. He'd always been the most aggressive of her patients--she'd treated him numerous times for various cuts and bruises, even a few broken bones garnered from his ceaseless fighting, injuries procured mostly from the young man standing at her side, whom she'd treated just as often for similar injuries.

The coolly amused bottle glass jade of his eyes flashed to pure emerald fire. He spun, dropped the rising Zell with a vicious kick to the kidneys, and flung himself back around before either Squall or the doctor could blink.

His face tight with rage, Seifer launched himself at his remaining nemesis, the tattered ends of his ragged coat chasing him dutifully, fluttering brightly against the contrasting darkness of his pants.

The doctor lunged for the overturned medical cart as both men hit the floor in a tangled heap, rifling frantically through spilled supplies until her shaking fingers closed around the reassuring smoothness of a hypodermic. She ripped the cap free, stumbled to her feet, and advanced on the thrashing knot of flailing limbs.

Seifer reared back with fist raised, upper lip peeled back over the shining brightness of his teeth, Squall's flushed face swimming drunkenly before his gaze. He could crush the bones in that prissy little pretty boy face, cave them in beneath cracked and bleeding knuckles, fill that gaping mouth with a red, choking sea…

_Do it. _her voice urged.

Stormy blue-gray locked on verdant, Squall's indiscernible eyes as closed-off as ever.

Seifer's fist trembled above his head, checked by some small voice that whispered harshly beneath the velvet thunder of her tone. _Get a fucking hold of yourself, Almasy._

But _her _voice--or perhaps somewhere along the way it had twisted into his own--snapped at his hesitation, a pair of gleaming scissors poised before the final thread of his sanity. This was what he'd hidden from for the past year, this darkness that he'd always felt inside himself. But what had once been a mere seed took firm root under her influence, and now it had blossomed into deadly nightshade. He could prune it back, like a skilled gardener wielding his shears, but the roots had already trapped his heart between wiry limbs, to feed off any ounce of goodness that might still exist in Seifer Almasy.

Squall's gaze bored hard into his own.

Seifer faltered a moment longer, the fist wavering unsteadily--and a sudden bee sting of pain pricked the back of his right shoulder.

He felt the needle slide through his flesh, felt it hot and aching like the pierce of the sun's rays against unprepared eyes. His world fuzzed out of focus, the fast-acting drug hitting his veins eagerly, and Seifer slumped passively across Squall's rigid body.

* * *

He woke to the steady plink of water droplets, and the musty stench of neglect.

A Hyne-awful headache dug savage claws into his temples and yanked mightily, threatening to separate the young man's head clean from his shoulders, it seemed. If only he could remember how to focus, to bring his eyesight back under control, pin it down, keep it from spinning so wildly, like the whirling rotors of an out of control helicopter. At least then he might be able to figure out where he was.

Seifer blinked, and rubbed at his eyes with a mumbled curse.

He found himself sitting in dampness as his world slowly, so slowly returned to him, cognizant thought trickling in thin streamers to his brain. The moldy odor became more pronounced as his senses sharpened, and he resisted the urge to gag.

_Where the fuck am I? _the young man wondered, focusing hazily on the knuckles of his left hand, bruised and nicked with bleeding little grooves. He hoped he'd at least worked Squall's pretty face over just a little, even as another voice wished he'd gotten a handle on his more aggressive emotions that seemed to spin so quickly out of control. For once.

It was that anger, that assertive need for dominance that had driven him straight into her welcoming arms, into the furnace depths of hell.

The young man tested each limb cautiously, finding only a spattering of superficial bruises. Sore, and a bit stiff, but still retaining all his mobility. He could deal with that. He'd endured far, far worse after all.

A nervous young face contemplated him from a safe few feet away, blocked from his own by the silvery slash of metal bars. Through them, he could see only darkness, a black well broken here and there by sputtering pools of light, flowing from a few naked bulbs scattered sporadically throughout the room. If he had to guess, he'd wager he'd been shut away into the basement level of Garden, the dirty little secret that nobody could bear to look at, but one they couldn't destroy either.

He pulled experimentally at one of the bars.

"Hey, don't do that." the young man called to him, sounding even more nervous than he appeared.

Seifer pinned the guy beneath his trademark scowl, enjoying watching him squirm. He looked prepared to shit himself at any moment; a little intimidation and he could probably persuade the kid to open the cell himself.

He draped an arm insolently through one of the slots in the door of his prison, lazily strumming stunted nails along cool steel. Metal burned cold and clammy beneath the graze of his fingertips, icicles melting beneath a pale winter sun and trailing chill ribbons beneath the sleeve of his overcoat.

He could practically smell the anxiety radiating off the young man, reeking of sweat and panic and something even darker that burrowed under his baser emotions like a maggot through rotted flesh. Seifer remembered that scent well, had smelled it careening off his victims throughout the war often enough, even catching whiffs of it on himself at times.

It struck a chord inside him, live and humming and vaguely threatening, a power line standing tall beneath the heated crackle of lightning. Seifer felt its surge through his veins, bubbling adamantly in his blood.

_-The crimson blood of her mouth, arranged in the icy cold smile that chilled him to his core. Power flashing bright and insane in her eyes, in his veins-_

He blinked, returning to the present. The dying screams of a ruined celebration trailed inky strands behind it, flicking tentacled edges along his brain before it fled to the darkness of the vault he kept those recollections stored firmly inside.

Seifer pushed aside the memories that poked thin holes through his control, banishing that day to a distant corner of himself. He still caught flashes of that day, his first official appearance as the Sorceress' Knight, of the parade that flowed before him like brightly-hued molasses. A rainbow dancing in ceaseless motion, the musical jingle of elaborate costumes twining with the delighted laughter of children.

"So where am I?" Seifer asked nonchalantly, even though he already had a pretty good idea. He allowed his lips to quirk amicably in the kid's direction, but didn't bother to conceal the seething menace in his steady gaze. Bad enough that he found himself trapped behind the relentless jail bars of his own mind more often than not--for them to stick him in here, particularly after he'd saved Garden's precious little princess from certain death, really pissed him off.

"I'm not authorized to speak with the prisoner." the young man, really a boy-- probably a scared second year not yet even qualified to take his SeeD exam--replied.

"Well the prisoner's speaking to you. It's rude to ignore people." That was a laugh. Seifer Almasy, lecturing someone on manners.

The kid stared blankly at him, panic in his eyes, reminding Seifer of an animal caught in the oncoming rush of headlights.

"Come here." the blonde ex-knight insisted, hooking a finger toward the boy.

"My orders are to have no contact with the prisoner." he insisted, stammering only a little.

Good fuck. Where had they picked this kid up? And why hadn't he already run screaming from Garden, wetting his pants the entire way, all the way back into Mommy's protective arms?

"So what am I supposed to do?" Seifer snarled. "Sit here with my thumb up my ass until Puberty Boy decides to remove the stick from his ass long enough to let me go?"

That at least wrung the faintest of smiles from the kid's pale lips. Probably not used to hearing Garden's fearless commander described in such a manner.

"What am I being charged with, at least?" he demanded. "Denting Chicken Wuss's forehead? That was self defense. Little shit jumped me first."

The boy hesitated a moment, debating with himself, then opened his mouth to respond. "You're being charged with the attemped murder of Quistis Trepe."

_Fucking great. _The one time he actually performed a good deed, it turned around to bite him in the ass. "I _saved _the precious little instructor. She'd be dead if I hadn't shown up when I did. Ask her." She didn't hate him that much, that she would risk her integrity by lying just to screw him over.

Did she?

Seifer shook himself mentally. She could have easily said nothing during his trials and the endless debate of whether or not his crimes should be pardoned, as Edea's had. Cid Kramer's influence had partially removed his ass from the fire, but he knew it was Quistis' cool-headed logic that had completely saved him in the end. Why bother if she wanted to see him dead?

Green eyes darkened to the deep jade of a forest cast in thick shadow. He narrowed them, his gaze fairly spitting verdant daggers in the kid's direction.

"I'm sorry." he stammered. "But I'm not authorized to let you out until Instructor Trepe wakes up and can corroborate your story."

_Because no one trusts the word of a traitor. _The young man didn't say it aloud, but Seifer heard it anyway, hanging between them with all the weight of a hurtling meteor.

In the end, he couldn't really blame them. Hell, Seifer didn't trust himself as far as he could throw Raijin, and considering the young man's mass, that wasn't a hell of a long distance. How could he expect those like Squall and Zell, whom he'd tormented endlessly all during their childhoods and into later years as well, to blindly believe anything that tumbled from his lips? Zell probably would have gladly seen him executed a year ago, and Squall as well, though from the man's taciturn young face one could never really tell what emotions lurked beneath the surface.

"Fine." Seifer snapped, understanding but furious about it nonetheless. He hated this fucking place, with its stinking walls and its shadows crawling their way into his brain. He could feel it closing in on him already, though he'd only been awake for about ten minutes of his incarceration.

That left sleep as an option, and he refused to go there. He could tell already that nightmares more real than imagined waited for him in the black pit of slumber, beckoning with smug assuredness to his still faintly drugged mind.

That left only one more choice, and he knew his guard wasn't going to appreciate it.

Settling down onto the sparse cot shoved into a corner of his prison, Seifer stretched long legs out before him, crossed at the ankle, his eyes settling with the fierce concentration of a deadly jungle cat onto the twitchy young man.

* * *

"Almasy."

The cool voice infiltrated the black fog surrounding him, tickling annoyingly at Seifer's subconscious.

"Almasy, get up."

_I _am _up, asshole. _he snarled silently, realizing a moment later with some surprise that he actually wasn't, that sometime during the night--or was it day? Hard to tell down here--he'd tired of staring down his young sentry and at last succumbed to sleep's honeyed voice whispering him into oblivion.

He turned his head now, hearing it rustle against the rough bed beneath him, growling a hostile "The fuck you want?" in the voice's direction. Through slitted eyes, Squall's stiff limbs and grim frown laced into his mind, shoving aside the cobwebs draped throughout it.

"Get _up_, Almasy," Squall hissed, and Seifer had never heard so much naked loathing in the usually reticent man's bland tone. "Get up right now."

"Nnnngh." he groaned, swiping an arm across the crust of fluttering eyes. Easy riser he was not. "The hell you want, Puberty Boy? Come to let me out of here, finally? I told you I didn't have anything to do with the attack on Quistis. Even an asshole like myself can tell the truth once in a while."

"Open it." Squall quietly ordered the young guard, who fumbled with the key ring on his belt in a dazed panic.

Something wasn't right. Seifer dragged himself to both feet, seeing homicide in the stone of those gray-blue eyes; at least if Squall meant to kill him, he was going to die a man, standing, not hunched over on that uncomfortable cot while Leonhart beat him out of existence. "What the hell is your problem?"

"She's dead." Squall said coldly. "Quistis died." His voice wavered just slightly, hiccupping on the syllables of her name, dragging raggedly along its surface before finishing the statement.

Seifer's heart thumped against his ribcage with bruising force, plunging into his boots as bile rode an acidic wave into his mouth. His gut clenched nervously, balling into fetal position and coiling around his spine, pressing itself into each bone plate until he though the prickle of his backbone might burst right through the lining of his stomach.

_No. Squall had not just said that. The words 'Quistis died' had not just slid through his lips to dangle, like mocking shadows, on the curve of his mouth before plummeting into the space between them. _

"Bull fucking shit, Leonhart." Seifer snapped. "Dr. Kadowaki said she was going to be fine. Just fucking ask her what happened--she'll tell you I had nothing to do with it."

But the controlled pinch of Squall's lips betrayed the truth of his words, and Seifer felt something shrivel deep inside him, drifting to join his heart and settling like a hard stone in the tips of his footwear.

_Ashen lips drooped loosely; the sigh of her whisper caressed his ears. A final exhalation as the red slid through his fingers like silken strands of rope, a rush of air like a desolate curl of tattered mist. And dammit, hadn't he thought then that she was dead? Hadn't the thunder of his heartbeat matched the thunder of his boots as he ran with her leaden and still in his arms to the infirmary? Hadn't he known the fire had been scoured from the ice, even as Dr. Kadowaki opened her lips around a gentle smile and informed him Quistis was going to be fine?_

Seifer fought for breath now the same way she had, the bellows of his lungs malfunctioning, siphoning air too slowly.

They had been his enemies, obstacles to be removed from his path. He would have killed them, with the madness singing in his veins like fire, with her insane laughter goading him on, slipping like razor wire through his ears. Yet, in some perverse way, he had looked forward to their encounters, to the surging adrenaline of the fight, metallic on his lips. They had presented challenges to him, and Seifer Almasy, if nothing else, loved challenges.

Now, with the heat of her insanity sapped from him, with his mind mostly his own once again, he realized that he had not hated them, not even when her promises of power heaved toward their highest peak in the shell of his body. Chicken Wuss irritated him to no end with his whiny personality, Squall with his aloofness, Quistis with her stodgy inflexibility when it came to rules, the other two women with their childlike girlishness. Kinneas he could tolerate, if only because the man's easygoing nature made it hard for anyone to truly hate him, but the others had always grated beneath his skin.

But Quistis…a small part of him could now admit he had admired her at times, even harbored a schoolboy crush on her during long afternoons spent watching that beautiful face grow animated with each student's success, a glow to her skin, a flame beneath the porcelain of her cheeks that he fanned even higher with his interruptions. She had never given up on him, even after he'd long since stopped believing in himself, and that impressed him. To think that so much perseverance could be wrapped up in such a slender package…

"Lock the door behind me." Squall's voice broke through his reverie.

His long-time rival faced squarely off against him, the cell's meager light pouring in a taunting little dance over the blade that appeared in one hand.

_-__Blood taking flight into the air, winging in shining crimson ropes over screaming chaos. The stench of burst bowels a malodorous tickle in his nostrils as he presided over his battlefield-_

_-Her pale features shining under a black velvet sky, murmuring tales of glory-_

_-Red in his hands, dripping against the lethargic flutter of her sleepy pulse-_

Seifer came awake with a sharp gasp.

His cell loomed shadowy and bare around him, chasing light from the farthest corners into a stagnant little pool in the very center. He stared in confusion at it for a moment, the stain of her blood still splashed across his mind as he came slowly back to himself, relief burning a hole through the middle of his chest.

_A dream. _And what a fucking dream it had been.

He shook his head slowly, propping himself on an elbow to observe, through bangs that unglued themselves from his normal slicked-back hairdo to scatter across the fringe of his eyebrows, the unsympathetic visage of Squall Leonhart, marching toward him with murder scrawled in the stony gaze.

* * *

Cafeteria

Balamb Garden

Quistis' fist slid up to crease her cheek, balled flesh slipping from chin to the curve of her face.

Across from her, Zell regaled Irvine with his latest in hot dog conspiracies, this one involving giant war robots and a power-hungry dictator intent on taking over the entire hot dog industry. The look of lazy amusment on the sharp-shooter's face failed to discourage Zell, who either took the expression as one of rapt attention, or simply didn't care enough to stop talking for all of two seconds. Selphie, perched in his lap with Irvine's arms pulled loosely around her, delighted the bright-eyed Rinoa with her own tale, probably the latest gossip involving Garden's hottest couples; Quistis couldn't be bothered to even attempt listening to that conversation. Selphie's rapid-fire diatribe combined with Rinoa's muffled giggles tried her patience even when not burdened with the dull ache of her injury.

Squall, predictably, appeared just as unenthusiastic as she felt.

Quistis sighed, and poked listlessly at her meal. Her fork scattered limp lettuce through the slimy mound of mashed potatoes that she could swear was eyeing her maliciously, the mahogany sludge of gravy a malignant iris boring straight through her skull.

Hyne. Even her food was out to get her.

Giving up--she possessed little appetite anyway--Quistis tossed her silverware down in disgust just as Zell reached a particularly active section of his conspiracy, one hand slicing through the air to emphasize his words, smashing down against the table a moment later and causing everyone's lunch to take a short hop above chipped plastic. Irvine's drink bobbled uncertainly, dispersing a few droplets onto Selphie's short little dress, dampness that actually drew her attention away from her conversation for a split second. "Irvy!" she cried in protest, then without another pause was off and running again, the bouncy flip of her hair bobbing with the lively telling of her story.

"Sorry darlin.'" Irvine drawled.

Quistis shook her head. She never had understood how those two worked--the hyperactive little blur of constant motion that was Selphie Tilmitt paired with the most laid-back man she'd ever encountered in twenty years of life. Yet they'd lasted over a year now, and neither seemed to have any inclination of pursuing other love interests.

_Ah, the mystery of love. _the young woman thought sarcastically. That was one puzzle she would never solve--not that she possessed any desire to do so. Seifer had once told her she would probably end up married to Garden itself, in that insolent tone of his, the suggestion accompanied by the little smirk that somehow always managed to burrow beneath her skin.

Seifer. She was still coming to terms with the fact--nearly a week after the attack--that he had saved her. If it hadn't been for the well-timed ark of Hyperion, carving into the man's chest with the ease of razor wire through vulnerable flesh, Quistis Trepe would not be sitting in a cafeteria perfumed with the fragrance of mystery meat, listening to Zell launch into an anti war-robot-hot-dog-thief rant.

She sneaked a quick peek at Squall, seated across from her frowning down into his bowl of soup. He had _not _been pleased, to say the least, to learn that Seifer had actually been telling the truth regarding his part in Quistis' injuries. Quistis knew he had never trusted the green-eyed blonde, but since the end of the war, his rivalry with Seifer had soured into pure, unadulterated distrust, and she knew he was now just searching for a reason to have the other young man thrown out of Garden.

He'd actually made a few valid points; Seifer was neither a SeeD, nor did he have any intention of becoming one, and thus his presence at Balamb Garden was unnecessary. But Cid, kind-hearted and too soft for the leader of one of the world's most prestigious military academies, had blocked all arguments against Seifer, his fatherly instincts clinging stubbornly to the fair-haired boy who'd chased fireflies through a viridian meadow at his side.

The loud screech of Garden's broadcast system cut through Quistis' skull like scrabbling claws, hooking cruel talons into her brain and tearing.

"Quistis Trepe, please report to Headmaster Cid's office at once. Quistis Trepe, please report to Headmaster Cid's-"

Hyne.

She peeled her friends' gazes from her in long disapproving strips as she stood, shaking out the golden stream of her hair, its ends dancing, a lion's mane set to unrest after a toss of the feline head.

"Study session at 1400, Selphie." Quistis reminded her friend casually, brushing lint from her pants beneath Squall's scrutinizing gaze.

Selphie's chirpy "Sure thing, Quisty!" chased her out into the hall, bouncing after her in energetic waves that threatened to consume the tired young woman, like a flash flood preying on an unsuspecting village.

She was Hyne-damn sick of the questioning, the stares, the stagnant disbelief buried behind caring expressions. No, she was sure she hadn't been hallucinating; yes, Seifer had really saved her life, no, she hadn't a clue as to whom had attacked her, or why.

Quistis turned a corner, just barely avoiding collision with a harried young man on his way to lunch, and resigned herself to her fate.


	4. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: I still don't own FF VIII or any of its characters, but if anyone is willing to give them to me, I'd be more than happy to accept.**

**A/N: The title of this fic is the same as a song off Story of the Year's first album; thanks to Oneiromancy for pointing that out; I forgot to mention it before. Hope they don't mind me borrowing it, I just thought it seemed to fit. Also, big thanks to Oneiromancy for reviewing; I appreciate it. On that note, I hate to sound like one of those whiny REVIEW MY STORY NOW authors, but I've had this up a couple of weeks already and still only have one review despite a decent number of hits on it. I'll post this chapter and maybe one more here, but if people don't start reviewing, I don't see the need to keep putting up chapters, as I'm not sure whether anyone is even actually enjoying it. I'm not going to abandon writing this fic, it just won't be posted on . **

**Chapter Three**

Dormitory

Balamb Garden

Seifer scowled up onto the pale outline of his ceiling, watching the skeletal shadows of emaciated tree limbs stitch themselves across white plaster.

He could count each crack by now, distinguish between every nook and cranny in the battered roof. A map of SeeDs long past, each generation leaving its own unique mark scribbled deep into graying paint.

In one corner, _Zeta loves Schmoopy! _lay faintly engraved, the letters hacked messily into aging plaster a few feet from the darkened light bulb. In another, _Suck you off for 3 gil, please call 555-3809 _raised boastfully up from the ceiling's outline, and Seifer wondered with a faint sting of mirth whether anyone had actually attempted calling the number. Probably. Not too many men possessed his prowess with the ladies--he'd known several classmates who'd been hard up enough to actually dial a sex line one night, from the library extension, no less, while he sat facing the door with his feet propped casually on one of the desks, ostensibly to act as lookout.

He'd heard the clomp of nearing footsteps against hard tile nearly a minute before the librarian's entrance, and merely smirked at her approach, listening with deep satisfaction to the guilty cries of the boys behind him as she whisked past him with a somewhat frosty greeting. Seifer had disrupted the room's quiet more than once, and to this day the woman running it beneath an iron fist didn't much like him. She hadn't yet succeeded in having him banned, but he just knew the old bat was trying her damndest to make it happen.

That night she hadn't the time to scold him, though, before she discovered the perversion taking place in the back of her library--she'd timed it just perfectly, really, walking into the midst of their group just in time to hear some lady purring promises of 'the tightest pussy you've ever fucked' through the phone's receiver.

He laughed about it even now, burying the snickers in the crook of his arm.

Come to think of it, hadn't Chicken Wuss been a part of that group?

A light knock at his door jerked him from pleasant memories of boxed ears and high-pitched screeching. With an irritated scowl, he rolled to one side, checking the time scrawled in the bright florescence of alarm clock numbers, annoyance digging a fiery channel through his chest. Who the fuck had stopped by to pester him at 2:30 in the morning?

He flipped again to his back, and thought of just ignoring the tentative thrum just barely jarring the door against its hinges. Not Raij, obviously; even one of his gentler knocks would have damn near torn the door right out of its place, with Fuijin's bellowing anger completing the job.

_Probably Squall stopping by to tell me that he _knows _I didn't save Trepe's ass, no matter what she says, and that he's watching me._

Exasperation dragged barbed hooks along his flesh, a living current beneath his skin. He felt the usual rage surfacing, rearing its ugly head through tenuous restraint, ripping gaping fissures into the flimsy membrane of his patience. Telling the Commander to go fuck himself appealed greatly to him, but in the end, what was the point? He'd only find himself fastened coldly beneath the emotionless pinpoints of those eyes, like a hapless bug clipped to a square of cardboard, on display for all.

The knock repeated, and with a sneer, Seifer flung himself from the bed and wrenched the door open.

"What?" he spat into the face of his visitor, so prepared was he to see Leonhart's impassive features that he found himself a bit taken aback when confronted with Quistis' soft face, moonbeam pale in the muted light of the corridor. "Trepe." He ran a hand through his hair, somewhat flustered by the abrupt surge and subsequent death of his anger.

"Nice to see you too." she replied with just as much warmth, propping a hand on one slender hip and surveying him in a way that suddenly made Seifer want to slam the door in her face and crawl back into his bed, her dissecting gaze making him feel too much like some specimen beneath a microscope. Her eyes, chilled but not nearly as cold or hard as Squall's, were nonetheless disconcerting, like the edge of some drill seeking out weak areas to cleave through solid stone.

"It's late, Trepe." Seifer informed her shortly. _Or early. Whatever._ "What the hell are you doing here?"

A split second lightning strike of hesitation pierced the cool gaze. It disappeared a moment later, and she lifted something dark and soft-looking into his line of sight, an object he had to squint to make out. A piece of cloth, as far as he could tell, black, probably, or a midnight shade of blue--hard to know for sure in the weak lighting. "Look, it's nice of you to stop by and visit me and all, but you could have just as easily brought your panties by to me this afternoon. You know, at an hour that's actually fucking reasonable for human beings to be awake."

Quistis rolled her eyes. "I'd rather ride a Chocobo naked through the middle of Esthar."

Seifer's eyes took on a contemplative glint, the young man clearly picturing such an event.

She resisted the urge to introduce her fist to his nose. Somehow, he'd always managed to scratch his way through her control like that, burrowing under the calm tolerance that was Quistis Trepe. Perhaps it was the memory of the smirk now tipping his lips into the self-assurance of a man who will love himself more than he will ever love anyone else, an expression she'd seen grace his handsome features numerous times throughout her classes. Usually followed by some derisive comment that enveloped her students in nervous chuckles, an awed sort of fear lingering in the air whenever he challenged her.

"Do you mind if I come in? The Disciplinary Committee isn't as…iron-willed as yours was, but I'd rather not be caught wandering the halls after curfew nevertheless."

Seifer eyed her lewdly up and down, crossing his arms and leaning one muscular shoulder against his doorframe. "Well you did interrupt my beauty sleep." he lied, a suggestive little smile slithering across his mouth.

"Hyne knows you need it." Quistis replied icily.

"So," he continued as though she hadn't spoken, "I'm going to need something to make it worth my while."

"How about not finding Save the Queen wrapped around your neck?"

"That's a little kinkier than I was thinking, but I'm open to trying new things." He laughed in her face for a moment, enjoying the fire of those cerulean pools, flames spreading hot and thick across their surfaces, before finally pulling himself out of the doorway and leaving her to follow him inside.

The door clicked quietly shut behind her, and Seifer turned to find her regarding the place with a slight crinkle of her pert nose.

Her expression raised his hackles for some unknown reason, and he found himself defensively folding his arms before his chest, a barrier between the two as they stood facing one another. "Hyne, I know it's not exactly sterile, but there's nothing growing in here. I don't have a damn maid--unless you're willing to volunteer your services. In fact, I was actually in this store the other day that was selling this skimpy little maid's costume--along with some other merchandise--and I-"

"Do you recognize this?" Quistis interrupted him, flipping the lightswitch with a flick of one long finger and holding the piece of cloth out to him.

The sudden flash of illumination pooled in his pupils, tracing the curves of her face under loving fingers of gold, a filmy glow captured in the sunny radiance of her hair. He blinked, dazzled for a moment, and sent her an annoyed scowl. "Dammit, Trepe, you think you want to warn me the next time you do that?"

"You're a member of one of the most elite fighting forces in the world, and you're upset by a little light in your eyes?"

"I'm not a SeeD." Seifer reminded her, the emerald glow of his eyes festering to an acid jade.

So. Underneath the nonchalance and his blatant disregard for following orders, he was still just a young man angry at his own failure. He'd always exhibited a faint scorn for the SeeD exams, and though Quistis had suspected that of being a cover for his disappointment, seeing the stale bitterness lodged in those green irises hurt her, just a little. She'd always hated watching her students fail, no matter how much trouble they'd caused. Seifer had always wreaked more than his fair share of havoc, but he'd also been one of her most promising pupils.

_-Snarling anger polished bright and crackling in his eyes. The quicksilver shine of Hyperion, a lethal glittering line across the pallid curve of Deling's throat-_

_-"Stay back!" Fear in her heart, thundering heavy and thick in her ears. Churning with the sloth of crystallized honey in her veins-_

_Moving on. _She indicated the section of material once more. "Does it belong to you?"

He winged a brow at her. "You came all the way over here at 2:30 in the damn morning to see if I'm wandering around with my ass hanging out of a hole in the back of my pants?"

Quistis huffed out a little sigh. "I found it in some bushes near the walkway where I was attacked--it looks like it could have come off the clothing of the man who ambushed me. I just wanted to make sure it didn't get ripped off your outfit in the struggle before taking it to Dr. Kadowaki to see if she could get some kind of trace evidence off it."

"There wasn't a struggle. He didn't touch me."

"I know. I thought…you might have torn it off yourself, to stop the bleeding."

_-Her blood…so much of it, flooding in elongated strands through the clutching desperation of his fingers-_

_-Terror a cold icicle stabbed through the pulse beating fast and violent in the side of his neck, a bird smashing itself in panicked fear against a closed window-_

"It's not mine." Seifer said coolly.

Quistis lowered it hesitantly, silence gathering like sullen storm clouds between them.

In all honesty, her curiosity could have easily been settled with a brisk phone call, and it certainly would have been more appropriate than showing up unannounced at a former student's dorm room in the Hyne-awful early hours of the morning. Just because she found herself unable to sleep, plagued by uneasy pricklings of thought, spiraling around her head in a malestrom of questions, didn't mean she had the right to interrupt Seifer's peaceful slumber.

However, Quistis gathered from the sooty smudges she often observed beneath the penetrating green fire of those eyes that Seifer probably slept less than she did, chased through an endless loop of nightmares by demons far more hellish than those that sought her out. She'd stood on the fringes of hell during the Sorceress War--he'd plunged right into the midst of it, bubbling magma that ate away at his shins to spurt fiery streams into the marrow of his bones.

"Actually, I was really just using this as a sort of excuse." She tucked the square of material into the back pocket of her sweats, and clasped both hands in front of her. "I never thanked you for what you did."

Seifer waved a hand loftily in the air. "Don't bother. One good deed versus five thousand sins isn't exactly worth gratitude."

"It's worth it to me, Seifer." she said quietly. "I wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for you."

She could see she'd thrown him off balance--he reminded her of a beaten dog at times, one that expects the hand raised to it in kindness to strike in anger. The specters that moved through his eyes and hummed beneath his skin were dark ones, silent wraiths born from reasons she couldn't even begin to guess at. They'd always existed, if one knew where to look for them, but since his return from the war, they'd grown far more pronounced.

Seifer Almasy was a man rotting away from the inside.

Her eyes slipped to the shabby gray trench coat draped carelessly across a chair taking up one corner of the room, a tattered ghost forever tainted with the scent of blood. She glimpsed it in her dreams sometimes, dull and uninteresting beneath the fiery silver of Hyperion's glinting brilliance, slashing before him in a proficient dance. She saw it at Deling's throat, held there by a brazen young man who'd ultimately been trying to help, even if he'd gone about it entirely the wrong way, saw it pointed at Squall's throat in a promise of death as he knelt in the shadow of his master.

_Tell me Seifer, _Quistis wondered silently, _did it hurt when the puppet strings were cut? _Had he felt himself fall, through the spilled ink of the mist she wrapped him in, onto the rock hard pavement of reality?

"Is that everything, Instructor?"

She dragged her gaze away from the handle of his gun blade, catching points of lights from the bulb overhead and tossing white-hot little daggers back into her eyes.

His sarcasm was a potent thing, as it had always been, but she sensed a decayed sorrow beneath it. Maybe it had always been there, and she just hadn't taken the time to notice.

"Yes. I'll let you get back to sleep now."

"Any idea who might want you dead?"

He regarded her mildly, plain curiosity hovering in his eyes. She sensed no concern, just a blasé nosiness that probably had more to do with boredom than any desire for a real answer.

"SeeD has many enemies."

"He didn't target SeeD. He targeted you. A rejected Trepie, maybe?" he mused.

She stiffened at that, sending a cold glare in his direction. "I'm sure it was just meant as a violent act against Garden in general, and I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Not very professional of whoever was responsible."

He was right--it was something Quistis had pondered over and over this past week, and her assailant had struck her as anything but unprofessional. She figured, to her great dismay, that he'd probably had a specific target in mind while he crouched alone and deadly on top of that roof, which meant that somewhere in the vast reaches of the continent, someone wanted her dead. And since they hadn't succeeded, they would in all probability send others to get the job done.

Seifer apparently reached the same conclusion. "Might want to get yourself a bodyguard, Trepe."

If only he could know how those words would circle back around to bite him squarely on the ass.

* * *

Squall could think of about a hundred other places he would rather be as he strode toward Cid's office, stiff and coiled, vaguely resembling a caged animal weary of its captivity to those he passed. Garden's inhabitants had long since grown used to his flinty silences and cold stares, but those iron blue eyes still held the ability to stab wintry little blades of fear down the spines of those who earned the young man's wrath, particularly those who'd seen what he could do with a gun blade.

The door to Cid's office loomed in front of him. He gritted his teeth and coaxed down anger's rippling fire, heating his veins and dancing along nerve endings. This particular meeting would require a tolerance he had never possessed.

He inhaled deeply, clenched one hand to a tight fist, balling all his emotions into the curve of that palm, and swung the door open.

Seifer twisted slightly at the neck to drag an unconcerned look Squall's direction, before dismissing him and turning back around to stare imperturbably at the wall, both hands hooked behind his head.

Quistis flashed him a smile, though it appeared strained around the edges. Dealing with Seifer could do that to a person.

"Puberty Boy." Seifer acknowledged out of the corner of his mouth, lifting an eyebrow in faux innocence at the warning look Quistis shot at him.

Squall coolly ignored that, standing rigidly in front of the door with hands knotted at his back, stiff-spined and formal as he braced himself for the coming unpleasantness.

Cid looked up from something on his desk and smiled warmly, fatherly affection in the curve of that mouth. "Squall. Thank you for dropping by. I promise this won't take long; I know you have other things to be taking care of." He took off his glasses and scrubbed tiredly at both eyes--either the mounds of paperwork were beginning to wear on him, or Seifer had rubbed even such a patient man the wrong way. Squall could believe either one--Seifer Almasy could drive a saint to homicide. Hyne knows he'd been tempted more than a few times, though saint he was not.

The older man folded his hands on the desk before him and flicked a glance over each of them, a paternal sparkle in the gentle dark eyes. Squall felt a tickle of discomfort as the look passed over him--he never had grown used to Cid's less formal way of addressing the Orphanage Gang when out of sight of the rest of Garden, memories of sprinting on lanky legs through the creamy froth of ocean waves with that big bear of a man smearing back into obscurity as he continued to junction his Guardian Force, a recollection that still existed but grew hazy around the edges, like wood smoke escaping a chimney. He never tried to grasp for it when he felt it slipping from his grasp--he was not a nostalgic person and saw no need to strain himself remembering something of that little importance.

"Quistis has requested a temporary replacement to take over her instructor's position while she looks into the attack that took place last week. She did find a piece of cloth she believes might have been torn from her assailant's outfit, but tests run by Dr. Kadowaki didn't find anything of significance. Unfortunately, we have no other leads, and since whoever is behind this didn't succeed, they'll probably send someone else. I agree that it's a wise idea to try and get to the bottom of it before they strike again."

Quistis acknowledged this with a small nod, the full lips twitching in the faintest of smiles for Garden's headmaster. She'd obviously already talked this over with him. However, the next statement apparently struck her with as much force as it did the two young men, judging by the instantaneous widening of those glistening blue eyes, swimming large and startled behind wire-rimmed spectacles.

"However, considering that her life is, in fact, in danger, I've decided to assign someone as her bodyguard." He held up a hand to silence any protests, and continued. "I know it's not something you can appreciate right now, Quistis, but another pair of eyes watching out for you can't hurt. Squall, I thought it best to keep you up-to-date on the latest developments of this, and Seifer…out of all the inhabitants of Garden, I think you're the most qualified to keep Quistis safe."

Quistis' look of surprise changed to dismay. Seifer just appeared pissed.

Squall lost all semblance of control over his temper, and stabbed a finger brutally in the blonde's direction, as animated as any of the other three crammed into the small office had ever seen him. "You're trusting _him _as Quistis' bodyguard? He's not even SeeD! He's a traitor."

"He was acquitted of all charges, Squall." Cid reminded him gently.

"He's not trustworthy. He'll sell her out to the highest bidder. He can't take orders; he'll put her at risk. Let Irvine or Zell handle it."

"Seifer was always one of the most talented students in Quistis' class, regardless of whether he passed the SeeD exam or not. Would you say that's an accurate statement, Quistis?"

The young woman suppressed a groan, sneaking a glance at Seifer out of one corner of her eye. He sneered unpleasantly at her, looking as though he might very well enjoy finishing the job her attacker had botched. _Just wonderful. _she thought angrily.

But she couldn't lie. Quistis Trepe allowed only the smallest of white lies to slip free of her mouth, and only very infrequently at that. Proclaiming Seifer incompetent would stretch far beyond a mere twisting of the truth.

"Yes. He was." she admitted reluctantly. "But Squall's right; I trust you remember just how many complaints were brought up against him, both by myself and other students? He was always disruptive and fighting authority every step of the way. And with all respect, sir, I don't _need _a babysitter-"

"Thanks for talking about me like I'm not here." Seifer interrupted sarcastically. "_Instructor _Trepe can watch her own ass. I don't want the job." His emphasis on her official title made the word sound derogatory, dirty somehow.

"This isn't an option, Seifer." Cid replied, sounding stern for the first time during the course of the conversation.

"I'll do it." Squall volunteered, the determined set of his features making his scar stand out more starkly than usual.

"Awww." Seifer spit out, leering in the other man's direction. "The knight in shining armor comes riding in to save the day again--but don't you already have a princess waiting for you? Decided you like blondes better after all?"

"Not possible, Squall." Cid intervened, frowning at the barely-contained tension roiling between the two young men. "You're Commander of Garden--you have far too many duties here right now. Seifer, on the other hand--"

"Is a nobody, so why not stick him with Garden's finest and let him take a shot meant for her? I'm expendable, after all."

"Are you afraid?" Cid asked mildly.

_That _garnered an immediate reaction. The green eyes flashed, shot through with flecks of gold that reflected the office's light and hurled it back in Cid's face like sun-drenched diamonds. "I'm not a coward."

"You would be putting yourself at risk to guard Quistis, of course. It's understandable that you might have reservations. Fear of dying is nothing to be ashamed of, Seifer."

"As I already mentioned, I'm perfectly capable of looking after myself. I really think this is something best left just to me. The less people looking into this, the less chance of discovery." It was too late, Quistis could tell that even as she spoke. Seifer's pride had just taken a substantial blow with Cid's insinuation of spinelessness, and no matter how much he may loathe her, he was about to become her second shadow. She choked down a scream of frustration. Of all the perfectly capable, _pleasant _students at Garden, Cid settled on Seifer Almasy? Had the man's morning coffee been doctored?

"Seifer, do we have your cooperation?" Cid asked calmly, completely ignoring her.

_You don't have _my _cooperation. _Quistis thought angrily.

The ex-knight leaned forward in his chair, a muscle jumping spastically in his clenched jaw, cold fury at having been maneuvered like this--by Cid, of all people--radiating from him in hostile waves. Quistis could nearly feel the phantom brush of their icy tendrils along her own skin, barbed hooks of frost that snagged along each vertebrae of her spine.

"Fine." he snapped, standing so quickly his chair shot out from beneath him and clattered against the far wall. Quistis winced at the impact; Squall merely tightened his already taut body further, close to snapping in half if he didn't relax in a moment.

The furious blonde swept around, his battered overcoat snapping after him like an aggressive beast dogging the heels of some hapless victim who'd stumbled into their territory, promised retribution buried deep in his gaze. One hand followed, arcing around to jab straight at Quistis' nose, the finger held without a tremor despite his rage. "You're not going to enjoy this, Trepe."

"Obviously." she said coldly. "You think this was my idea?"

Seifer merely shook his head and stalked past her, his shoulder purposefully slamming Squall back a few steps, the door banging behind him a moment later, his angry stride echoing hollow and menacing throughout the corridor outside.

* * *

Trepe's bodyguard. Trepe's fucking _bodyguard_. He would have to shadow her every step, a silhouette to match the one pooled like spilled ink beneath her feet, the eyes in the back of her head constantly alert to the smallest of perils.

He despised the way he'd allowed himself to become ensnared in her problems this way. First stepping into the initial conflict itself, and now cornered into actually risking his own life to protect Quistis'. Ironic, that the man who'd once attempted to kill her now found himself saddled with babysitting duties. In fact, he might have even found it amusing, if he weren't so preoccupied being pissed.

He could find solace only in the fact that Trepe hated this arrangement even more than he did. At the very least, he could entertain himself with rubbing it in her face every moment they were together. An amount of time about to increase exponetionally, Seifer realized distastefully.

Seifer pictured Quistis' beautiful features as he prowled through Garden's crowded halls, barreling past students who turned to him with indignant protests half dangling from their lips before they recognized his trademark sneer, shoving those out of his way who didn't clear from his path quickly enough. The blue ice of those eyes, frozen more thoroughly than normal as they flicked over him with all the warmth of one scrutinizing a particularly nasty insect, the displeased pucker of the full rosy lips. _Like she'd just been sucking on fucking lemons or something. _

"Seifer!" The voice boomed above even the teeming chatter of Garden's best and brightest, raking with the sharp squeal of steel on rock through his ears. "Seifer, slow down, ya' know!"

"STOP."

_No. _What little amount of patience stored deep in his soul, lying stagnant and seldom used in the hollow of his gut, had long since evaporated into mist, draping gauzy wisps through his veins and slithering from the pores of his flesh. He needed to escape this noise, the relentless humming of a hundred voices, a cacophony that beat at his skull with vicious fists-

_-"Kneel."_ _The silken thunder of her rich voice, venom in his ears, in his veins-_

_-Impassioned whispers of glory and power, razor wire through his brain-_

_-"Kill them, my Knight. Kill them all." Hesitation tunneling through his innards, thin and cutting, wrapped in the incubating threads of his anger-_

He slammed open the first door he came to, stumbling into the cool isolation of the parking garage as he gripped his head in both hands, his eyes swimming in their sockets like drunken fish. _Fuck. _Hyne, let her just leave him alone, let her just disappear completely, wiped clean from his mind, the imprint she'd burned into his psyche scraped away by the fingers he dug frantically into his skull. He could hear her so clearly now, booming in his ears, twining around his brain, a snake tightening in its final squeeze around the unfortunate victim trapped in its coils.

"Leave me the fuck alone!" Seifer yelled, folding to his knees and banging crazily at his forehead with the heels of his hands, feeling the cold pavement burning through the knees of his pants, feeling the insistent press of more smooth flesh against the jagged rise of his scar.

"I think you actually followed me in here." a dry voice commented from the corner.

He suppressed a snarl, snapping his head upright so quickly the darkened garage spun dizzily before him for a moment. _Trepe. _Of course. Fucking wonderful that the Ice Queen herself had just witnessed him plunge over the deep end into the swirling abyss of madness.

At least, he realized as he picked himself up and deliberately brushed off his clothing, her tormenting voice had ceased its painful shredding inside his brain.

Those eyes regarded him serenely behind their glass prisons, the shimmering haze of her hair a flaxen halo encircling the glowing rose of high cheekbones. She really did remind him of an angel sometimes, with all that golden hair and the innocence that brushed gentle smiles across her lips. Too bad she was colder than a frozen-over hell.

"You can stop frowning now--you may as well get used to seeing me now that we're stuck with one another." Her voice carried only the slightest hint of regret, but then she'd always suppressed emotions well. She turned something in her hands, and Seifer found his gaze drawn to it despite himself. A book, sitting open on her lap, which she perused intently for a moment before wetting a finger and flicking through another page.

"Trepies chase you out of your room or something?" he demanded, the hostility not quite absent from his voice yet, rage and annoyance still a pulsing ember burning hot and bitter in the center of his chest.

"No. It was just starting to feel a little cramped to me, and this seemed like the only place where I could get a little privacy."

"Love poetry you wrote to dearest Puberty Boy?" Seifer demanded with a humorless smirk, indicating her book.

"No." Quistis replied calmly. "How To Deal With An Annoying Egotistical Jerk For Dummies. I thought reading something that broke it down into the most simple terms possible might allow you to continue living. While I'm preoccupied with how slow the book is, you can slip off into the crowd before I use Save The Queen to strangle you."

"How am I supposed to act as your bodyguard if you're trying to kill me?"

"You could always forget that little conversation with Cid ever happened. I think we both know I'm perfectly capable of handling myself-"

"The same way you handled yourself while that guy was aiming to blow your fucking brains out last week?" Seifer interrupted, casually inspecting his fingernails. He could practically feel the room's temperature drop, Trepe's chill little aura dropping farther in temperature as her spine stiffened. "I had to 'handle' the situation then too. I guess Cid realized I'm better at taking care of your problems than you are."

He hoped that stung, the same way Cid questioning his courage had burned deep inside him, a festering wound thick with infection.

Quistis snapped her book shut, the slap of its covers meeting echoing strangely in the cavernous space. "We'll be meeting at Balamb Station tomorrow at 0700 hours. Try to bring a little more silence and less attitude."

"Oh really?" he demanded. "_We're _not going anywhere unless I fucking want to."

"You don't have a choice. These are official orders now, signed off by Cid. You're not a SeeD and you have no intention of becoming one, so essentially you're living off the mercy of Garden by staying here. Cid's decided you're useful to keep around, but if that changes…" she trailed off, letting him think that through for himself.

"Nice try, Trepe. He hasn't thrown me out yet." And Hyne knows he hadn't exactly brightened Garden's atmosphere; it wasn't as though he were being kept around as some sort of trophy to be admired. A reminder, maybe, of the dangers of ambition, of listening too intently to the voice whispering in the deepest parts of night to reach for more, to graze for the stars shining so far away…

"Charity only lasts so long." Quistis pointed out.

"I don't need any fucking _charity_." he snarled.

"Then find someplace else to go."

But there was nowhere else for him to go, and they both knew it. It was the only reason he'd returned, the only reason he'd relinquished himself to the staring, the whispers, the occasional timid questions. _Fuck you, Trepe. _

"Seifer, you really were one of my most promising students." Quistis told him with a sigh after a long moment of silence, a note of wistful sadness creeping into her voice. "I know you could have done something great. Maybe you still can."

"Spare me the psychobabble shit." he snapped.

"I suppose I'll see you tomorrow morning, then?"

"I doubt it. There are probably enough hits out on me as it is, without me having to worry about any on your head."

"You did agree to this."

"Temporary insanity. If Cid wants to throw me out, let him just fucking do it. I'm starting to get a little sick of this place anyway."

* * *

Balamb Station

Balamb

Sunrise painted a wide strip of crimson across distant hilltops, bloody radiance that scattered its rose glow across the strength of his brow, highlighting a spattering of seldom noticed freckles across the bridge of a straight nose.

Quistis glimpsed his reflection in the window of the ticket counter she stood at, and suppressed an amused smirk. Of all the faces she'd spotted that morning, Seifer's was definitely the least pleasant.

Hunched into his coat against the morning's brisk coolness, scowling at anyone who dared glance at him, his gaze landed on Quistis after a few moments of scanning the sleepy station, and the expression deepened, twisting into downright loathing.

Nice. Just the way she wanted to start off her day. Really, a quick bullet to the back of the head would be preferable to this.

_Inhale, exhale. You can deal with him. You put up with him as your student for almost two years without killing him, even if the tempation was there._

She thanked the bored-looking woman behind the ticket counter, gathered up her purchases, and marched determinedly toward him. "Good morning Seifer."

"No it isn't." he snapped, fiddling with the frayed cuff of one sleeve. "You want to tell me where the hell we're going?"

Hyperion glinted at Quistis from the folds of his coat, its handle just barely peeking out at her from beyond worn material. Seifer closed his hand over the tell-tale glitter of metal, fingering smooth steel for a moment as he glared down at her, looking more sour than normal. Not a morning person, obviously.

"You'll know when we get there." she said in answer to his question, purposefully evasive because she knew it would annoy him. She knew he wasn't about to make this a pleasant experience for her, and damned if she was going to return his grouchy antagonism with sunny kindness.

He didn't reply, apparently content to sulk in silence as she handed him his ticket and they moved off toward the last outbound train still sitting on its tracks. Past the station, a shrill whistle cut through the air, followed by the high-pressured blast of steam whirling up into the morning sky. Seifer scowled at the noise and sunk deeper into his upturned collar, reminding her in that moment of a petulant child denied his candy.

Quistis hitched the bag she carried a little higher on one shoulder, and studied her companion unobtrusively out of the corner of one eye. A shadow of beard lightly frosted his chin, blonde stubble that captured red-tinged rays of sunlight and held them against his skin, miniscule rubies that glittered against his lightly-tanned jaw line. The look struck her a little oddly; before the war he'd always been clean-shaven, arrogantly picky about his appearance. Muscles held tight to show them off to their best advantage, handsome--almost beautiful, really--face impeccably clean, hair styled in its usual slicked-back fashion to display the angles of his features to anyone willing to look. The hair hung the same, a little longer, a little shaggier, perhaps, the eyes just as sharp and predatory as before…and yet something was different about them as well. It was that faint hint of sadness, of a general weariness at life, lurking just behind the arrogance and I-don't-give-a-shit attitude.

It reminded her of the same emotion she found herself contemplating in the mirror most mornings.

She let him board in front of her, the green eyes sweeping balefully over the locomotive's other passengers. Quistis offered a few polite smiles to those who looked curiously at them, the expression changing to one of slight discomfiture as a small boy reached out to yank at the hem of her shirt. Children always made her slightly uneasy, her experience with them limited. She was a mercenary, a soldier, and consequently anything that delicate and precious awakened a slight tinge of nervousness in her.

Seifer slapped the kid's hand away. Not hard enough to really do much more than slightly sting the small fingers, but with enough force to have the little tyke bursting into tears, gulping sobs that earned a wrathful glare from the young woman whose lap he perched on.

"Seifer!" Quistis hissed, apologizing to the boy's mother as they moved past.

He rolled an eye back in her direction. "I'm supposed to be your _bodyguard_, aren't I, Instructor?" he asked sarcastically, directing a glower at an old man who allowed his gaze to linger a moment too long on the pretty blonde behind him.

"Congratulations on doing your job so well; I'm sure small _children _everywhere are prepared to inject me with large doses of fast-acting poison, or perhaps they're setting up sniper rifles from the safety of their playground toys--"

"Be grateful I'm here." he snapped.

"'Grateful' isn't exactly the word I was thinking of."

"Then pretend I'm not here, and don't talk to me."

Hyne. _Really _not a morning person. Well, let him be that way. It wasn't as though she was exactly let down by his attitude; she'd expected nothing less, after all. And he didn't exactly top her list of favorite people either; keeping a barrier of silence between them sounded far more appealing than dealing with his moods.

Seifer wedged his tall frame into an empty compartment and immediately stretched his legs out before him, propping both boots on the seat across from him. Quistis stepped over him with only a slight prickle of annoyance and seated herself beside the window, ignoring his stare as she slid the bag from her shoulder and unzipped it, fishing around for a moment before drawing free a large notebook.

She sensed more than saw him turn away a moment later, and allowed herself to become absorbed in her notes, content in the knowledge that he would keep an eye out for anything suspicious. She really didn't expect much action on this trip anyway, although it would be nice if her research turned up something useful.

"Tch." Seifer snorted. "Bringing paperwork on your vacation. Typical. All work and no play makes Trepe a dull stick-up-the-ass, you know. You remind me of Puberty Boy sometimes. The two of you should have hooked up. Maybe making good on that whole unrequited love for him thing might actually take the stick out of your ass."

"Regretting the fact that the better man won in regards to Rinoa?" Quistis snapped. She didn't normally lose her temper so quickly, but Hyne dammit, he just rubbed her the wrong way so easily…

"Yeah right." His smirk dented one cheek; she glimpsed it in her peripheral vision, and tensed at its appearance. She knew several women at Garden who would have gladly given up their right arm for a chance to have such a devastating little smile aimed at them, but Quistis, knowing that it preceded trouble, found that it only increased the tension throbbing between her temples. "Jealous you don't have another Trepie to add to the list?"

"I would hardly want _you _as a Trepie." _Hyne, if Seifer really were a Trepie, he'd probably beat up all the other ones just to make sure he was the only one left. _If the blonde thought of something as his, it didn't matter who or what stood in his way; they were gone, as simple as that. "What happened to not speaking?"

"I said _you_ don't talk to _me_."

Quistis stifled a pained sigh. If she'd ever met a man more infuriating than Seifer, she must have blocked such a traumatic memory from her mind, because she certainly couldn't remember having done so. "If I suggest a truce, it goes both ways. We both keep quiet and do our own thing. Do we have a deal, Seifer?"

"I keep my mouth shut and you keep yours shut, even if I do…this?" Leaning over, he tore out a fresh sheet of paper from her notebook, quickly assembled it into a rather sloppy paper airplane, and flew it straight into the side of her head.

Quistis' fists tightened against her kneecaps where she draped them for support, squashing the urge to steal Hyperion and batter Seifer's head in with it. _Bodyguard my _ass_, Cid. This is turning more into babysitting duties for me. _

This was going to be the longest train ride of her life.

Cid Kramer watched the hands of the clock wind toward 8:00, blankly contemplating each tick of the minute hand while paperwork staggered to treacherous heights around him.

The noise of the plain black timepiece slid into his ears, an undulating ribbon that teased at his doubts, magnifying them in his brain until he could think of nothing else. _Tick tock, tick tock. _

A weary sigh slid from lips edged slightly in the telling creases of age.

Had he made the right choice, sending Seifer off with Quistis like that? Edea had thought so--in fact it was her involvement, her pleading which had given him the idea in the first place. _"You haven't forgiven either of us in your heart, not really. He's a good boy, Cid, underneath the bullying, the arrogance, he's a good boy who was taken advantage of. I think he's actually very lonely, and Ulticimea exploited that, with my help. I'll never forgive myself for that. Give him a chance. Please, for me." _

His wife, whom he loved so very, very much. It hurt sometimes, a dull ache in the gut like twinges felt in a phantom limb, his remembrances of ordering the assasination of his own wife swirling like muddy water in the storm drain of his mind. He couldn't forgive himself for that, and consequently he just couldn't look at her the same way anymore, without shame burning a sharp cavity into his soul. But she could still reach him with her words, with the softest touch of those slender, pretty hands, the graze of her voice saccharine and gentle in his ears. During nights when he could think of nothing but his soldiers, his children, dying alone and in pain on a faraway battlefield, he wrapped her voice around him, and held to it like a man who couldn't swim clutching a life vest in the middle of a lonely sea.

Seifer had been a good child. Cid remembered that about him, even if no one else bothered to. He'd bullied, and he'd pestered, as he still tended to do years later, but his more devilish personality traits concealed the big heart swathed in layers of intimidation. It was Seifer who'd wiped the tears off Quistis' cheek when she'd fallen out of the old oak tree at the back of the Orphanage even as he insulted her for being a crybaby, Seifer who'd helped Edea bandage Selphie's scraped knees after a particularly rough afternoon spent playing, Seifer who'd plunged out after the screaming Zell when he waded too far into the ocean. He was the protector of the group, the one who bossed them all around and expected them to kneel to his commands, but also the most fiercely defensive when someone other than himself threatened his family.

The group's Knight, a hero riding his noble steed into battle, his armor shining as a second sun in the eyes of his enemies.

How terrible the fall had been, when it came. The Knight's armor shattered, scattered in a million pieces around him, brittle glass that reflected the feverish light of his eyes back at him.

Cid dropped his head into his hands. _Please, for Hyne's sake, let our faith in Seifer not be unfounded…_


	5. Chapter 4

**A/N: All right, chapter four up more quickly than I thought it would be. I don't really have anyplace else to post this, so for the time being I'll keep updating on this site. I really would appreciate some feedback for this, though, if you're enjoying it. You don't need to leave me a three page review, just a quick comment as I'd like some opinions on this. Thanks to those of you who have already reviewed. Hope you enjoy!**

**Chapter Four**

Library

Balamb Garden

He sneaked a glance out from behind the large text book he hunched behind, the building's gentle lighting basting her face in a burnished curtain of gold and skipping across soft-looking bread.

Yep. That was definitely a hot dog in her hand.

Zell tightened his hands on the book's spine, the leather binding creaking in protest. For Hyne's sake, where had she managed to scrounge up a hot dog?! He'd been informed over the last several days that no, there were no more hot dogs, absolutely none, not in the cafeteria or all of Garden, and certainly not hoarded in the basement by a colony of hobos. (Normally he kept such theories between himself and his friends, as he didn't want anyone suspecting he was on to them, but in a moment of weakness he'd blurted out his accusation to an uninterested lunch lady who seemed little impressed by his genius.)

But now, here was this young woman sitting a few tables away from him--a rather attractive young woman, actually, Zell noticed when he took his attention off the hot dog for a split second--calmly reading while she chewed happily away at her snack. He tried not to drool as he watched her; it had been far too long since he'd tasted one of those succulent sausages against his tongue, and just admiring one now left his stomach growling pitiably.

The girl, seemingly sensing the laser-like intensity of his focus, glanced up, smiled distractedly, and turned a page in her book.

Panic began to boil, mixing with hunger in his stomach as the sorely missed treat continued to disappear, bite by agonizing bite.

He _needed _that hot dog. In fact, without it, he would in all probability die or something horrible like that. At the very least, he would shrivel into a withered little husk of his former self and _then _who was going to-

"Excuse me, can I help you?"

Zell jumped guiltily, dropping the book with a loud thud, putting him directly into the girl's line of sight. She gave him a smile of what he could only assume was indulgence, as though she were humoring some drooling idiot, a though which pissed him off a bit--although if he were honest, Zell had to admit that he probably had come across as something of a simple-brained moron with the way he was zoning out in her direction…

"Uh…"

She smiled again and tucked a wisp of reddish-blonde hair behind one ear. The light caught in its shiny strands, suspended aloft on shafts of strawberry blonde. Brown eyes eclipsed by impossibly long eyelashes perused him, curiosity gleaming beneath the black crescent moons that shadowed each iris. "Can I help you?" she asked again, her voice light and airy. "You've been staring at me for a long time, Zell."

He scratched his chin, somewhat embarrassed at having been caught. He never had been particularly smooth with women, and this one was becoming more and more beautiful with each detail he took in. "How did you know my name?" he blurted too loudly, resisting the urge to clap a hand over his mouth. Or kick his own ass. Why couldn't some of Irvine's lady-killer instincts rub off on him?

The lips, dabbed lightly in some cosmetic to lend them a freshly-bitten look, twitched. "You're kind of famous."

_Oh. Right. Sorceress War, saving the world, all that. _"Yes. Yes I am." Zell agreed, nodding enthusiastically. _Say something intelligent, Chicken Wu--er…me. _He stifled the scowl that threatened across his mouth; fucking Seifer, injecting that nickname into every single conversation, until even Zell was beginning to think of himself in those terms. "Um, nice to meet you. I'm Zell." He rubbed a sweaty hand across the back of his pants and offered it to her.

She gripped his gloved fingers with surprising strength, obviously not nearly as delicate as she'd first appeared. But then, if she was here at Garden, she was either already a SeeD or applying to become one, and 'delicate' was hardly a qualifying personality trait for such a profession. Look at Selphie. Sunshine and giggles on the outside, but beneath that, a wicked fighter and a devious little mind that loved explosives and destruction even more than she enjoyed organizing her precious Garden events.

"I know you're Zell." the girl reminded him with another of those smiles, this one giving him the distinct expression that she smothered laughter behind it.

"Right. Well…"

"Was there a reason you kept staring at me?" she asked patiently.

"I, uh…" He felt himself beginning to sweat, searing little trickles that coursed down the back of his neck to tickle their way down his spine, each bead of perspiration snagging along every knot of bone. A sudden idea dawned on him, a light bulb snapping into fiery brilliance. "I'm part of the Disciplinary Committee and I noticed you're eating a hot dog. Having food in the library is against Garden's rules." He adopted his best stern look, narrowing the heavy brows, curling the corner of one lip into a menacing snarl guaranteed to cause the bravest man to submit to his dominance.

The young woman appeared mildly amused. "You're also well-known around Garden for your over-the-top love of hot dogs. Now, this wouldn't be some ploy to get my hot dog away from me and then eat it the second you're out of my sight, would it?" she asked playfully.

_Damn. There goes the whole pretty = brainless myth. _

He decided to charm his way out of the situation. Suavely, Zell draped an arm over a nearby chair, leaning his hip slightly against it in a pose he'd seen Irvine strike--and felt himself keep leaning, realizing too late that the chair rolled along on several wheels, helpless to stop his plunge as she looked on.

"Help!" he yelled, stumbling into a clumsy pile right at her feet.

Her upside-down features peered down at him in obvious amusement, the laughter threading through her gaze more kind than mocking. "I'll give you a hint about the hot dog; they just had a delivery made to the cafeteria about fifteen minutes ago. I would imagine they still have plenty left over, as long as you hurry." One expressive brown eye winked good-naturedly at him.

Zell scrambled to right himself, untangling his legs from the chair with frantic motions, drawing a few laughs from her. They chimed pleasantly in his ears, light and appealing, tinkling with the resonance of rainwater on pavement.

He realized as he blasted out into the hallway, knocking a junior classman flying in his haste, that he hadn't even remembered to ask her name.

_"Little boy, you're so alone. No one to love you, no one to care whether or not you go down in a blaze of glory on the battlefield. You've been unloved your entire life, but no longer. I can change that. I can make them care. They will look up at you from bended knee--and _they will care_. They will admire you; you will have their recognition. Follow me." _

_She slid gracefully into his subconscious, a touch of poison in the roiling dark of his thoughts, a thread of sickly toxin that curled like the delicate flick of a snake's tongue into his psyche._

_Wafting, weaving, corrupting all she touched, the graze of phantom fingers felt as an icy shard that embedded itself deep in his spine…_

_He could feel her inside him, around him, all around, completely trapping him. _

_His deepest fears, his greatest regrets…she wound them all into a throbbing globe that weighed heavily in the pit of his being, setting it free to hack a destructive corridor deep into his soul. He stirred beneath its sick aura, turning away, resisting…but she guided gently, so gently, without force or violence, until his confusion swamped over him in a crashing tide. _

_In the openness, the vulnerability of that moment, she thrust deep, and he swallowed her whole._

Seifer woke with a start, to the chime of the loudspeaker announcing the next stop, and Quistis poking him.

She flicked her gaze across him in a rather insulting once-over, securing a loose strand of hair behind one ear and tapping the eraser of her pencil against the notebook still open on her lap. "Thank you for your concern over my life."

He glared at her in confusion, scrubbing the sleep from his eyes. "Huh?"

"I doubt it's common procedure for a bodyguard to take a nap while he's on duty."

"Don't give me that self-righteous shit. You don't even want me here. I'm surprised you didn't take the opportunity to kill me in my sleep."

Quistis' mouth flickered ever-so-slightly. He waited for it to blossom into the softness of her full-blown smile, but she only allowed it to curl at either tip with a sharp sparkle twinkling razor-edged in both eyes. He felt a slight pang of regret; much as Seifer hated to admit it, he liked the way that gentle smile completely transformed her face. It softened the features, accentuated the beauty she seemed hardly aware of. Annoying or not, he could enjoy a piece of eye candy now and again, couldn't he?

The hiss of brakes raked through Seifer's ears, the train's barreling motion slowing in unison with the noise. Quistis swayed a little in her seat, hardly seeming to notice the interruption in the locomotive's smooth travel, calmly scribbling away at the piece of paper before her. "This next stop is ours."

Seifer remembered his irritation with her for refusing to let him in on their destination, but sleep, and the disturbing images it brought, snatched away the remaining echoes of his annoyance. He stretched lazily, draping one arm across the back of the seat between them, grazing her shoulder with his fingertips.

She pretended not to notice, but he could tell she had by the way she gave a slight, almost imperceptible twitch.

He liked that. Anything that caused the aloof Quistis Trepe to twitch bore repeating.

Seifer did it again, more deliberately this time.

Quistis didn't react, so, growing bored with that particular let's-drive-miss-prim-and-proper-up-the-wall technique, he opted instead to lean around her and peer out the window at passing scenery, trees whipping by in jade blurs that smeared hazily before his eyes. They whirled before him in a disconcerting kalaidescope, the green of spindly branches blending in an artist's pallet of hues with deeper pockets of shadow.

_He knew that blackness. It visited him in his nightmares, spiraling up from a depthless, stagnant pool that glistened in silent wait for him…_

He could see that same blackness now, reaching out for him with oily fingers, curling in the collar of his jacket, pulling him forward, into her wicked arms…

"Seifer."

"What?" he snapped, shaking himself from his reverie.

"You can see out the window just fine from over there." She didn't lift her eyes from her writing.

That pissed him off. Was he so inconsequential, just another bug to be smashed under her heel when it became inconvenient to her, that she couldn't even fucking look at him for two seconds?

He purposefully slanted his head toward hers, allowing his breath to scrape along the curve of one ear. A feather light brush, teasing and sultry, prickling the tender lobe with hot tendrils of air. Any other woman would have melted, sagged against him with a kiss-me plea burning fervently in their eyes.

Quistis, typically, didn't even seem to notice.

Seifer drew back and crossed his arms, shifting Hyperion slightly on his hip. Hyne, the woman pissed him off.

Outside, the trees began to gain clarity, sharpening into focus, details popping out at him as the train continued to slow. He saw movement near one particularly dense thicket, and squinted for a moment in an effort to make out the animal stalking its way through lush undergrowth.

"Approaching Timber station. Departure in two minutes."

"Timber?" Seifer demanded. "I hate this fucking hick town."

"You could always buy a ticket back to Balamb at this station and turn right back around."

"Like that, wouldn't you, Instructor?"

"I admit I wouldn't exactly shed any tears." Quistis returned sarcastically. She slapped the notebook shut, slid the pencil into it's metal binding, and slipped the entire thing back into her bag. "I don't know if you've noticed this before, but you're not exactly pleasant early in the morning."

"No shit."

"Not that your attitude has improved much as it gets later."

"What did you expect?" he shot back. "I am with you, after all."

"Charming." she said dryly. "Don't tell me this sauve personality of yours is what's romanced so many women into your bed."

Hyne. What did she think he was, a slut? There hadn't been _that _many women in his bed. All right, there'd been quite a few, but mostly when he was a bit younger, and stupid enough to believe that meaningless sex could fill the aching emptiness that ate away at the gut.

"What the hell are you expecting to find here?"

"Probably nothing." Quistis replied unhelpfully. "But Dr. Kadowaki found some DNA on the piece of cloth I showed you that matched that of a known hitman who was--"

"Cid said the doc couldn't find anything."

"Cid lied. The man's body just disappeared--and since he most certainly didn't get up and walk away, that means someone came and got it. It could have been outside work, or…" She trailed off, clearly not comfortable with voicing such an accusation.

_Or there was a traitor at Garden. _Seifer felt uneasy despite himself. He'd always thought of Garden as the good guys, the play-by-the-rules types that he mocked endlessly and sneered disdainfully at. Fucking lambs, all of them--little puppets dancing at the end of administrative strings. _Though speaking of puppets, not that he could really talk… _But the thought that one of them might have strayed, might actually be united with some outside force in the act of murdering Quistis Trepe…that sat even worse with him, churned a queasiness in his stomach not helped by the train's shuddering as it braked to a long halt.

Seifer fingered the handle of his gun blade for a moment, a pensive look sketching his handsome features.

"Anyway, we weren't sure how much to reveal in his office; if someone really had infiltrated Garden, Cid's office would be the first place they'd put any type of surveillance equipment. It might just be paranoia, but better safe than sorry."

"So this hitman was from Timber?"

"That was his last known residence. Dr. Kadowaki came across a match for the man's DNA when she ran it through the Galbadian government's criminal database; the blood on the cloth belonged to a Dagan Jenners who was arrested for the murder of a woman three years ago. I did a bit of research on him, and he was suspected of several other killings over the past seven years. No one ever got a conviction on him, however; his arrest a few years back was the first time he ever faced the justice system. A pricey lawyer got him off, and he dropped out of the spotlight."

Seifer took that in silently, stroking a thumb lightly across Hyperion's grip. "It's funny that you, of all people, didn't notice that the piece of cloth you had to come wave around in front of my damn face at 2:30 in the morning showed up after several people had already been over that area. Chicken Wuss and Puberty boy most of all, and Leonhart's so damn methodical I don't see how he could have missed something like that."

"Yes." Quistis said quietly. "Almost like it was planted there later."

Seifer shot her a hard look.

The train lurched at last to a complete stop, giving a little jerk that jarred Quistis against him. She stood, avoiding the stony graze of his eyes, and slipped past him toward the aisle outside their small compartment. He snagged her arm as she passed, squeezing with just enough force to stop her forward movement and let her know he meant business. "You ever think this might be a trap you're walking into, Trepe?"

She regarded him coolly, nothing in the undaunted blue eyes that hinted at fear. "I trust you to keep me alive."

That stunned him. His fingers slackened, allowing Quistis to pry herself loose, and for several long moments Seifer simply sat there, remembering the conviction coloring her voice and that slight hint of a smile arching her lips again, astonished to find in his search of that indigo gaze that she meant every word. The knowledge weighed heavily on him, a hot stone in the pit of his belly.

It scared him to be handed that much trust. Quistis' life in the grand scheme of things was far more important than his own; she was needed, by her friends, by Garden. Seifer simply existed.

But that look also ignited something inside him, stirring an emotion he couldn't quite name, and wasn't sure he wanted to.

* * *

The White Malboro Diner

Timber

_This was a complete waste of a day. I have papers I could be grading. Hyne knows that would be more pleasant than staring at Seifer's face. _

All right, so the face itself was more than appealing; much as Quistis sometimes felt the urge to strangle Seifer until those pretty green eyes bulged free of his head, she could at least admit that he was a very good-looking young man. Arrogant, bullying, completely infuriating, yes, but good-looking. The only reason girls fell all about themselves at his mere touch, Quistis felt sure, because Hyne knows it couldn't have been his personality that set them swooning like that.

However, the expression twisting those striking features now was anything but appealing. The scowl furrowing the fair brow scared away the bravest of waitresses, even the one who'd originally jiggled into position before their table. Her lips glistened with the ruby promise of sex as they spread in a slow and burning smile his direction, dripping scarlet beneath shoddy lighting. They were as garishly cheap as the rest of her, an undersized halter top squeezing the snowy whiteness of large breasts, protruding them over the top of nearly translucent material in come-hither fashion. Quistis had spotted the hard bud of her nipples beneath the immodest top, a look-at-me display echoed in the bleached coil of blonde hair.

She very nearly lost her appetite, disgusted that the restaurant, substandard though it may have been, allowed their employees to dress in such a fashion.

Seifer to his credit had barely even flicked a glance the woman's direction. Either his taste in women had simply improved since the last teased-hair trash she'd seen him chatting up, or his mood had soured so completely even hormones couldn't intervene. Quistis elected for the former; after dealing with years of teenage students and classmates, not to mention her own personal fan club, she'd learned that not much interfered with male hormones.

Her companion growled something vague about using the bathroom and shoved off from their table, leaving the unappetizing dinner oozing across his plate almost entirely intact. She couldn't say she blamed him much; she'd barely poked at her own meal, after all, hardly doing more than just shifting it around her plate with a fork growing an untold number of life forms. She reflected briefly that it had probably been washed sometime soon after her birth, but in all probability not since then.

Quistis sighed, gave up on the gelatinous mass adhering to the tines of her dingy silverware, and dropped her chin into both hands.

A potentially relaxing train ride in the countryside, ruined by his alterations between stony glares and exasperating harassment. And following that, an equally frustrating experience in the town itself involving an upside down map and horribly convoluted directions that left them completely lost for a few hours. They never had managed to find Dagan Jenners' last place of residence, and the time spent searching for it resulted in the two tired, snappish young people missing the final train out of Timber. Certainly not one of her better days, all in all.

_And now we'll have to get a hotel room. Alone in a hotel room, with Seifer. _

Quistis suppressed a moan. She couldn't afford two separate rooms after her purchase of the train tickets. She prayed he'd brought along enough to rent a room of his own, though with the way her luck had been progressing the entire day, she doubted it.

_Cid, how could you get me into this? Anyone would have been preferable to Seifer. _Anyone. _Even a Trepie. Well, all right, not one of those. _

"Quistis Trepe?" a soft baritone inquired from nearby, jerking her out of gloomy thoughts.

Her head snapped up to confront a young man, perhaps her own age, maybe a tad older, dressed in ragged jeans and a slightly grubby T-shirt, overhead lighting snagging in the chestnut curls spilling rakishly into gray eyes. The strong jaw worked again, opening slender lips to deliver that soft voice once more, the syllables of her name slinking through Quistis' ears.

Her soldier's senses hummed alertly.

"Yes?" she asked cautiously, folding her hands on the table in front of her. Nearly deserted at this hour, the diner with its few tattered booths and grimy countertop bounced her voice off one wall to send it spinning throughout the weighty silence. _What the hell was taking Seifer so long? _She didn't like the look of this man; something about him screamed 'threat,' though he appeared innocuous enough. It was a faint prickle at the back of her mind, a burr beneath an unfortunate horse's saddle blanket that stung her brain.

"I was told to give this to you." he said, and presented her with a folded sheet of paper, a plain notebook page creased in half to conceal one side.

When she glanced up, he had disappeared.

Seifer returned in time to catch the confused frown marring her forehead, and slid in across from her once more. "What's that?" he asked, nodding at the paper she clutched.

"I don't know. While you were gone, a man walked up to me and gave it to me. He knew my name."

"Trap." he snapped under his breath. "Don't make me say 'I told you so.'"

"I haven't exactly been able to remain anonymous after the war. Anyone who's paid attention to news broadcasts over the last year or so probably knows who I am."

Seifer shook his head and draped an arm across the slick upholstery, one hand absently pulling at a tuft of padding jutting from one ragged hole. "Then why didn't he just ask for your damn autograph? Come on, let's get the hell out of here; you can read your love poetry later. I don't like this place."

"_No one _likes this place, judging from the fact that it probably hasn't reached its maximum occupancy since it first opened, fifty-nine years ago." Quistis responded dryly, tucking the page into her bag and leaving a small tip on the table. "We're going to need to find a place to stay."

"Hope you don't snore."

"I hope _you _don't have a bad back, because you're going to be sleeping on the floor."

"Think again, Trepe."

They exited the diner still mildly arguing, emerging into a soft rain, caressing water droplets that ran like damp silk down her pretty features. Spiraling in lazy corkscrews of black-laced turquoise, they flowed sinuously across the streets underfoot, capturing Quistis' shiny profile and reflecting the glossy portrait at Seifer's hooded eyes. He watched the rain crisscross her face, silver needles against the snowy backdrop of her skin, gun metal shavings falling to a placid winter wonderland.

Quistis turned to him, the golden hair soaked nearly to brown, one eyebrow cocking questioningly in his direction.

Seifer shook his head, and stepped out from the diner's doorway.

He nearly missed the tellatale glint of watery gray light off steel, but at the last minute, Seifer glimpsed the danger, and threw himself sideways into Quistis, spilling her, startled, onto hands and knees.

"Seifer-"

He heard the hiss of the dart beneath the storm's quiet drumming, and grunted as it nicked his left arm.

Hyperion came free in his hand with a sharp _shing_.

Quistis recovered quickly, and stepped into the path of the dark shape that materialized out of the rain, striking him stiff-armed in the throat as he attempted to take off running. He slammed onto his back with a noisy splash, and Seifer shoved her roughly out of the way, pressing a foot into the man's neck, Hyperion dimpling the man's pale skin.

"Wait!" the figure underneath Seifer's boot gasped.

"The same way you waited to shoot that thing?" the ex-knight demanded, pressing his blade more firmly into the man's neck. He ignored a look from Quistis, and crouched down beside the man's head, rainwater streaming off his bangs, keeping the would-be assailant pinned beneath Hyperion's intimidating length. His finger tangled in soaked curls--and yanked roughly, baring the tender curve of the windpipe even more.

"Seifer."

The madness burned in his eyes again. She recognized it from that fateful day, remembered the harsh glow of insanity behind clouded jade, drunk off the giddy high of power as he presided over the parade from Edea's float. It was there now, a shard of ice to ruin even the warmest of days.

Fear crawled up her throat. "Seife-"

The look vanished, and he was himself once more, kneeling in a muddy puddle with his lips twisted into a half-snarl.

"Quistis, it's me-"

"Me, meet Hyperion." Seifer broke in, looking almost bored now, rotating the point of his gun blade a little, until a thin ribbon of red bubbled up through broken flesh.

"The one from the diner--could you take that out of my throat?" the man hissed. "I can't talk with it there."

"No one gave you permission to talk anyway."

"Seifer." Quistis said calmly. "Get off him. But don't try to escape." she warned, brushing aside the jacket she wore just enough to reveal Save the Queen's tip.

"Thank you." the young man replied, adjusting his clothing and sending a wicked glare Seifer's direction as the blonde reluctantly relieved the pressure on his throat. The look bounced right back at him, the green irises impossibly cold.

Seifer shouldered Hyperion and flashed a dark smile.

"I wasn't trying to hurt you." the man explained, extending a hand in her direction, the offered palm 'accidentally' knocked out of the way by Seifer as he swung around to look down the opposite end of the street.

"Not with such shitty aim." Seifer butted in, again ignoring Quistis' disapproving stare.

"It was just meant to incapacitate you. I was watching you through the window…I saw you stick the note into your bag without reading it, and I thought you'd decided to ignore it. I didn't know how else to get you to Brac."

"Because kidnapping would make her much more willing to listen to whatever 'Brac' wants to say."

"Seifer."

"Oh for fuck's sake, Trepe; are you more dumb than I gave you credit for?" His brow pinched in annoyance. "No wonder you never could beat me. Too fucking soft-hearted."

"We did beat you, several times, if I recall."

"Good job with that." he snapped. "SeeD's--such a fucking talented bunch. Had to finish the job three different times, because they couldn't do it right the first. Just the kind of mercenary everyone wants to hire. And even then you didn't get it right--I'm still here." He laughed derisively. "Yet you think you're so superior to everyone. You let Cid groom you into these little sheep that just eat up everythin-"

"This is not a suitable conversation to be having at this time." Quistis interrupted through tight lips. She turned her back on Seifer without another word, devoting her whole attention to the young man before her, who looked somewhat sheepish now. "Your name, please, and remember that I'm good at detecting lies, and also that my patience is wearing thin. If you know who I am, then you also know that I don't carry this for show." She tapped her fingers briefly along Save the Queen.

"My name is Hayden Garth--I'm a student from Trabia Garden. So is Brac Tharen."

"What do you need with me that's so important you had to ambush me and try and shoot me with a tranquilizer?"

The gray eyes shifted uncertainly. "This isn't the right place to discuss the problem. It's not far to where I'm staying--if you'd just come with me-"

"Considering what's just taken place, I don't really consider that a wise idea."

"Tch." Seifer snorted. "The Ice Queen develops common sense for the first time on this whole fucking trip."

_The Ice Queen's going to shove the handle of her whip up your ass. _Quistis thought darkly.

"Please." Hayden said, and his eyes shimmered with something that appeared to be panic. "Miss Trepe, it's important; not just for us, but for you too. The attack at Balamb Garden a couple of weeks ago--"

"You know about that?" she cut in sharply.

"I didn't have anything to do with it." he said earnestly, and she corrected her earlier assumption of him being either around her age or even a tad older. He was younger, probably by a few years, the light that entered his eyes belonging to a scared young boy running out of places to hide and people to trust. Or perhaps it was just the way the rain caught on his eyelashes and slicked back the hair, emphasizing his youth the same way sleep paints a forgiving glow over the harshest of features.

Quistis sighed. "You planted the evidence that led me here, didn't you?"

"Yes. But I had nothing to do with that man trying to kill you, I swear."

_Hyne. _She pivoted toward the still-scowling blonde. "Seifer, tie his hands together."

"With what, exactly? The hair off my chest?"

"Please; that's not a mental image I need after eating at that place. Use this." she said, and reaching into the pocket of her pants, withdrew a switchblade, the shiny point clicking audibly free. She set it to the strap of her bag, and with a brief jerk of the arm, snapped one end of it loose, quickly setting to work on the other side, then handing the coil of leather across to him as she clutched the newly shortened bag in one hand. "That ought to work for now. Unless you don't think you're strong enough to hold him?"

He frowned at the faint insult in her voice.

"And you," Quistis said, pointing at the young man, who stood placidly as Seifer began binding his wrists, "nothing funny. I don't think you care to find yourself on the ground with his gun blade in your throat again. He does what he pleases, and if he thinks you need to be…disposed of, nothing I say is going to stop him."

Seifer grinned dangerously at the young man. "You recognize me, too, don't you?"

The nervous slant to his features revealed that if he hadn't before, he certainly did now.

* * *

Training Center

Balamb Garden

"Dangit, Zell, jest how many hot dogs did you eat?"

Hyne, what a question. He couldn't actually remember the _exact_ number, though he did have a hazy recollection of stopping his count somewhere around fifteen before a blinding nausea began to take over his body.

He let out a weak groan. "I think I'm _dying_."

"You look like it, Zelly." Selphie added cheerfully, poking the top of his head with the toe of one boot.

"Selph, darlin,' that ain't helpin' him."

She crouched down next to her prostrate friend, hands on her knees as she examined him. Sprawled facedown at the entrance of the Training Center, the cool metal pleasant against his burning face, Zell released another tortured moan.

"You look like Rin after she got that food poisoning when Squall took her to that restaurant--what was it called again, Irvy? The one with the big blue bird on the sign and the cute little umbrella gun blades in the drinks. She was up all night throwing up; I had to hold her hair back, because she just kept throwing up and throwing up, and-"

"Selph." Irvine cut in warningly, keeping a wary eye on Zell. His chalky complexion paled further at Selphie's account, something the sharpshooter hadn't really thought possible. He resembled the palest of marble statues, drained entirely of color, a snow sculpture with icy features contorted in agony.

"All right, why don't we just get you on down to the doc? Selph, darlin,' you take his other arm; I'll get this side. I'm gonna' move you now, Zell." _Please don't puke on my shoes. _They were a Christmas present from Selphie; if his friend ruined the expensive boots with regurgitated chunks of hot dog, she'd chop _both _of their asses up and feed them to the Training Center's resident T-rexaur. Irvine had a game of cards scheduled for later that evening that he'd been looking forward to; becoming a quick snack for the monsters that roamed this place wasn't really on his agenda.

Something hissed from behind him. He tensed and swung, expecting to glimpse the blur of some monster charging straight for his throat. The quick movement combined with Zell's weight unbalanced him and he stumbled backward, the rifle sailing up in a desperate ark-

Squall's piercing eyes stared him coolly down.

"Irvy, you're dropping him!" Selphie yelled.

"I'm gonna' _hurl_, you guys!"

"Not on my boots, dang-"

The audible heave of an unsettled stomach erupted over the small group, the ensuing splash marking an unfortunate plant growing nearby, but thankfully missing him.

Mostly. Irvine brushed a trickle of vomit off the sleeve of his jacket with an expression of extreme distaste. His own gut churned a bit, then calmed reluctantly.

"Took advantage of the sudden hot dog surplus." Irvine explained, hitching Zell's arm higher across his shoulder. "Idget forgot to stop eating when he got full."

Selphie tenderly wiped lingering traces of vomit from Zell's lips with her sleeve, pushing aside the disgust factor for that moment and babying him in a way that caused Squall to roll both eyes.

Irvine examined him suspiciously, taking in the commander's pallor and uncharacteristic nervous set to his features, studying his friend's face with a sniper's attention to detail. "What's going on, man? You look like him." He jerked his chin toward the groaning Zell, the blonde's head sagging on his shoulders, limply rolling to face the ground as Selphie and Irvine propped him between them.

"Nothing." Squall said, at least sounding like himself, the usual brusqueness entering his tone. He groped for the tie at his neck and tugged hatefully at the strangling piece of material.

Irvine blinked. _So much for your 'sniper's attention to detail.' _It had taken him nearly a minute to register exactly what was wrong with the picture in front of him; perhaps it had just taken his shocked brain that long to process the sight before him.Squall stood before him clad in dark formal attire, his hair neatly wet and slicked back, only a few stray pieces fluttering down around his scar, the arms pressed tight and military formal to either side of his impeccable clothing. "Goin' on a date, Leonhart?" he drawled.

Selphie squealed and clapped both hands, nearly dropping her half of Zell in her excitement. "Are you taking Rinoa to the Starlight?" Her exuberant question, nearly a shout now, elicited a wince from all three young men.

"Yeah." Squall replied with typical shortness.

"What's the occasion?" Irvine demanded. Something about the entire situation raised his suspicions, and not just the sight of Squall dressed in clothing he despised. Some instinct brewed in the pit of his gut, a nagging sensation that persisted, and he'd learned to live off instincts as powerful as this one. "Anniversary?"

"Not really."

"He just felt like taking her someplace special! That's so romantic, Irvy!"

_Great. Goodbye, last paycheck. _Thanks to Squall, Irvine now found himself faced with the prospect of either putting out for an expensive wineing and dineing experience, or sleeping alone for at least a week, maybe two depending on how long she decided to pout.

He resisted the urge to deck Squall.

"Something like that." Garden's terse commander said in response to her starry-eyed look, appearing more and more uncomfortable with the conversation.

_Definitely hiding something. _

"Little woman been holding out on you lately and you need something to kickstart the engine back up?" Irvine asked, jabbing him with an elbow, purposefully trying to provoke him. Squall's cheeks flared; the rare blush twitched Irvine's lips in a smile, one Selphie wiped away a second later with a hard stomp of her dainty little foot right in the center of one boot. _Dammit _but she could hit hard when angry… "Ow, Selph! What was that for?"

"Leave him alone. He's doing something nice. By the way, you haven't taken me anywhere like that for a really, really long time."

_Aw, shit. _He'd been hoping it would take her longer than that to notice.

"Irvine, could I talk to you for a second?"

"Sure thing, jest as soon as I get Mr. Dincht here down to Dr. Kadowaki before he upchucks on my shoes this time."

"Zelly, don't puke on his shoes. They were a gift of love."

"I, uh," And Squall pulled again at the tie with a glaze almost akin to panic spreading across his eyes, the Adam's apple bobbing tensely above the slender ribbon of dark silk. "I'm meeting Rinoa in just a few minutes. I was really hoping to talk to you right now. About the…Balamb Station mission."

Selphie cocked her head curiously. "What Balamb Station mission?"

"Er…right. Forgot about that, sorry. Selph darlin,' I'm gonna' leave Zell in your beautiful little hands, honey, jest for a second while we have a little chat. I'll be just outside."

He waited until Zell had been comfortably-or as comfortably as possible with his stomach trying to shrink wrap itself around his spine- settled back on the floor once more before following Squall out into the hall. "What the hell's this all about, man? You jest got me in hot water with Selphie, you realize that, right? Making romantic gestures like that jest ruins a man's-" His words tumbled off into oblivion, the rest of the sentence dying on his lips as the dark-haired young man thrust a hand into one pants pocket and came out with a small velvet box.

Irvine ducked both eyebrows, then lifted them to kiss the strands of hair seeping free of the cowboy hat perched loftily on his head. The sheen of perspiration on Squall's palms, the erratic twitch of the normally stone-hard eyes…he understood them all now. Joy for his friends blossomed in his chest, chased downward into the still slightly queasy depths of his gut by a pang of sadness for changing times. _No more late night boy's nights. _Not that Squall had ever been particularly social during them, but still…

"Congratulations, Leonhart!" Irvine whooped, firmly grasping the hand not clutching the jewelry box and pumping it enthusiastically up and down.

"She hasn't said yes yet."

"Jest a technicality, Squall." the sharpshooter replied casually, waving away the anxiety with a nonchalant flick of his hand. "Rin's crazy about you; everyone's always talkin' 'bout how you two are meant to be together and all that poetic shit. I say good for you man. 'Bout time."

"I don't know what to say." Squall hissed, his voice choked with as much desperation as Irvine had ever heard. _Man can face off against an all-powerful sorceress without so much as breaking a sweat, but put him in front of a girl and he's hopeless. _

"Well then let's jest see if we can whip a little something up for you here…Romance is my speciality, so jest memorize what I tell you to, and she'll be throwing herself across that fancy table to ravage like you've never been ravaged before, public decency or not…"

* * *

Starlight Hotel

Balamb

She wasn't, in fact, throwing herself across the table to ravage him.

Instead, Rinoa alternated between gazing out the window beside their table at the diamond twinkle of stars beckoning from the black velvet of a lucid night sky, and throwing him odd looks. The dreamy smile sketching her lips faded to a look of concern every time she glanced his way, confusion marking the smooth forehead.

She looked so beautiful, draped in that sparkling sheath of a long black dress, the same shade as the midnight coil of her hair. The soft features grew even gentler every time she met his gaze despite the unease that furrowed her brow, casting the brown eyes in a deep coffee hue.

He couldn't speak. They'd picked their way through several appetizers, the main course, and now a rich dessert, and still he couldn't formulate anything intelligible. All Irvine's suggestions, his own weak attempts at romance, all unraveled when confronted with that sweet face, the threads of practiced conversation slipping through his fingers to scatter like useless ash at his feet. He could feel himself sweating again beneath the elegant clothing, could feel the box heavy like a massive boulder against his right leg. He was Squall fucking Leonhart, savior of the world, destroyer of Ulticimea, and he couldn't even unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth to talk to the woman he loved.

Rinoa smiled sweetly at him.

He cleared his throat, opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, instead scooping a tiny spoon off the table and twirling it restlessly in one hand. Its curved surface caught the strings of light off the chandelier dangling above, illumination that danced in a rainbow prism over her pale skin.

She reached out a slender hand, and lightly touched his own with it. "Squall, are you ok? You've been acting weird all night."

He smiled grimly. "Fine. Just distracted."

"You didn't have to take me out, if something's bothering you that much." There was no hint of sulking in her tone, just genuine worry. "You don't have to go to all this trouble, you know. I love just being with you." She smiled again and gently pried the spoon from his quivering fingers, taking the large, callused hands in her own smooth ones. The smile dissipated into a frown. "Your hands are shaking. Squall, what's wrong?"

His stomach turned itself inside out, knotted into a million separate loops, and coiled itself tightly around his spine. If nothing in his life ever went right again, please Hyne, at least let this precious young woman who unimaginably opened her heart so easily to him not escape from him, like a fragile butterfly emerging from its cocoon to attempt its first tentative flight. His heart filled, emptied, then grew strangely cold in his chest, and for a panicked moment he wondered if it was still beating. But he felt the pulse there, heavy and thunderous in the side of his throat as he slid a hand up to scratch the nape of his neck.

_Breathe, Leonhart. This is Rinoa. You can talk to her about anything. _

What if she said no? What if that sweet, tender smile flattened into a wistful sadness and the pink lips opened around a gracious refusal? Seifer's gun blade slicing through his face had not hurt more than the pain crushing his chest at that thought. She could shatter his pride with a single word, destroy his world with two small, insignificant letters that suddenly carried more weight than the most urgent of all SeeD missions.

She could, with that delicate, heart-shaped mouth, snatch his heart from his chest and burn it to worthless cinders.

"You can tell me anything, you know." Rinoa prompted. "What is it? Something to do with Garden? Are you worried about Quistis?" She rubbed her thumb comfortingly across his rough knuckles. "Squall, I know you hate Seifer for what he did--for what he did to me, but you have to remember he wasn't himself. You have to forgive him eventually. He's trying to redeem himself, the only way he knows how to."

"By being an intolerable asshole?" Squall snapped, temper flaring instantly at the mention of his rival. He winced at the outburst and gripped her hands back. "Sorry. Didn't mean to ruin the mood." he muttered under his breath.

Rinoa laughed brightly. "What mood? You've been sitting here completely silent for the past hour while I eat all this wonderful food and you hardly touch anything. I'm not going to be able to get back into this dress again." She tugged playfully on the thin strap encircling her graceful neck.

He sighed and looked away, resisting the urge to pull his fingers from hers and bury his face in his hands. "I ruined it, didn't I?"

"Ruined what, Squall?" she asked softly.

"I had this speech rehearsed--Irvine even helped me with it because he's so much better at this type of thing than I am-" He stumbled over his words again, flustered, looking everywhere but her eyes while she stared curiously at him. "Rinoa, I know I don't really deserve…this," Squall mumbled, waving his hand in her general direction, "But I want you to know…"

The gentle pressure on his fingers finally pulled his gaze back to her. "Just say whatever you need to, Squall. It's all right. I love you, remember?"

That bolstered him, and he sat up a little straighter, the stern mouth flickering into an almost bashful smile, her eyes capturing the light from the chandelier and turning it a million times brighter.

"Ok." He inhaled deeply, untangled one of his hands, and slid it, trembling, into the pocket containing the ring.

Her eyes grew round as he set it on the table between them, the object taking a moment to register in her mind.

"Squall, are you…?"

"Rinoa, marry me." He looked away from her again, that awful nausea slithering inside him, burrowing a torturous path through his intestines. The heat of bile followed behind it, burying itself smugly in his gut while the silence stretched between them, taut like a wire stretched to its very limits. Sweat crawled over his palms, beading in fine little droplets of hot moisture over his scar.

This was it. And she'd remained quiet far too long, the moment extending into eternity, and oh Hyne why in the hell wasn't she saying anything? His damn tie was attempting to strangle him once more, and the romantic dimness of the restaurant's interior suddenly seemed far too bright, too dazzling. He was blind, he couldn't see, damn it, and Hyne he felt so hot…

It wasn't the lights stunning him after all, but Rinoa's million-watt smile, beaming at him with so much light and joy that his heart stuttered.

He relaxed a little, drinking in that elation, basking in it, his answering smile perhaps one of the widest he'd ever cracked.

The first gunshot rang out, and Rinoa faltered as she leaned across the table to kiss him.

He saw her pitch, chair and all, to one side, the impact hurling her into the beautiful window with its gorgeous view, saw her blood spreading across the floor beneath her still body. His eyes viewed this all with an almost icy attachment, but his brain understood none of it. Rinoa had not just been shot, it told him. Rinoa did not lie two feet from him, perhaps dying or already dead, his brain said calmly. That is not possible.

The screams penetrated his certainty, and the soldier in him took over even if the man could barely move.

Squall kicked over their table, upsetting silverware and a crystal rose vase in all directions, taking cover behind the flimsy sheath of wood as more gunfire chattered around him. He scrambled on hands and knees toward his fallen girlfriend. Hysteria took flight inside him, winging up into his throat as he gingerly touched shuddering fingers to the black fan of her hair.

Her eyes contemplated him blankly through the vacant frost of death.

_No no no no no no no no no._

Frightened cries sank into the roaring malestrom that swept through his mind. Lost amid the tumble of denials that screamed through him, they found themselves trapped jarringly in the bitter hollowness that ached inside his gut. Any moment she would blink, twitch the pale hand lying flung next to one cheek, smile gently just for him and say his name. Any moment she would stop lying so still, stop terrifying him with the slackness of her limbs. Any moment…

"Rinoa." Squall croaked.

He crawled over her as though to shield her delicate body with his own--ridiculous of course, since it was too late, only he couldn't accept that; dear Hyne no, she wasn't dead, not his sweet Rinoa for whom he'd risked so much-

Something punched him in the back.

He lurched forward, the gasp that stalled on his lips slithering painfully back into his throat. He heard, dimly, a bullet puncture the window a foot or so away from his bowed head, felt the spray of those tinkling shards dent his cheeks, sparkling gem-like under the chandelier's twinkling illumination. The waterfall of breaking glass flowed over them both, crunching, grinding beneath his hands. They pierced to the bone, a sharp, bright pain like the one stabbing him in the chest.

He gasped a deep breath, and his lungs filled with blood.

Squall dragged himself to both feet, swaying over her. He would die on his feet, like a man, looking straight into the eyes of the son of the bitch who dealt the killing blow.

The restaurant bucked crazily before him, plush carpeting careening up to meet the elegant arched ceiling. He couldn't focus, couldn't stop the mad spiraling of his surroundings, everything fuzzing strangely, a TV program consumed by static.

_Flash._

_-Stumbling through a barren wasteland, his boots raising arid puffs of dirt-_

_Flash._

_-The smooth raven wings of her hair, brushing the bare white collarbone, her face gone, ate away by an unknown acid-_

_Flash._

_-The sorceress' features warping, melting into an ambiguous blur of colors-_

The second blow took him in the stomach. He folded around it, hands instinctively cupping the surge of red that stained his clothing. The force of it knocked him back, and he stumbled over her body. He sensed the window's gaping opening behind him, felt the scrape of the few serrated edges of glass still clinging to its frame gouging at his left shoulder.

Squall teetered for a moment, blinking against the haze that entered his eyes, then, silently, he plunged over the side into an endless night sky.

_She felt his pain, a ripping agony that arched her body in a scream. Hyne, she could feel it so clearly, as though it were her own, could feel the bullets that lodged in his lung and his stomach as though they burrowed inside her own flesh._

_Squall…_

_His mental anguish, too; that stung even more inconsolably than any physical hurt. It bubbled inside him from a million different crevices, boiling over until she sensed it scorch her own veins. _

Rinoa awoke on the side of a dark road, cradled in his arms with his concerned blue eyes peering worriedly down into her ashen features.

_Squall. _

She touched his face in relief, and began to scream.


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

Dr. Kadowaki's Office

Balamb Garden

He clutched his heavy stomach as the ceiling above him clouded in and out of focus, too-white against the narrowed slit of his eyes.

Dear Hyne, he swore he would never look at another hot dog again, not as long as he lived…All right, so he knew that was a promise he probably wouldn't keep. By the next day Zell would more than likely have banished all memories of his agony and spent a few hours marching around the cafeteria like an angry drill seargent, glaring suspiciously at those insufferable lunch ladies who'd again told him they were out of hot dogs. But for right now he could convince himself of that, and placate his rumbling stomach somewhat.

The distant hiss of the door sliding open reached his ears. Heels clicked lightly across the floor toward him, the sound swelling and then receding in his foggy mind. Cool fingers lightly brushed their soothing path across his brow, a quiet stroke of the flesh that somewhat tempered the ache pounding in both eye sockets.

"So. Zell Dincht."

He knew that voice; it was not the doctor's, too young and more musical than her husky timbre, but the martial artist recognized it all the same. If only he could cling to the thread of that tone, fasten it down in his brain, close his fingers around the words swirling in a mystifying tornado through the miasma of his thoughts.

"Being seen for overeating--something you've apparently been in here for three times over the last two months." A smile entered the voice. "I guess those hot dogs didn't really agree with you."

"No, they did." he managed weakly.

"Too much, obviously." He heard a faint clatter; a clipboard being set aside, Zell assumed.

A blurry face eclipsed his own. "Open your mouth for me? I'm just going to give you a little something to help the nausea. Dr. Kadowaki doesn't think you need your stomach pumped."

"Good." Zell replied woozily. His tongue felt too thick, swollen and fat in his mouth, a leech grown obese on an overabundance of blood. "Pump bad."

The woman laughed. "Pump very bad. I guess you probably know that from experience."

He jerked his head in a nod as cool smoothness coated his tongue, leaving a lingering impression of cherry and bitter medicine against his throat. Its aftertaste twisted his stomach in protest for a moment, then settled it almost instantly.

"Shouldn't be long before that takes effect; you ought to be ready to walk yourself back to your dorm in about fifteen minutes or so. I guess I should take the chance to introduce myself; I didn't get to do that before. You left the library a little quickly."

_Oh! _The strawberry blonde from the library of course, the one who'd watched with laughter in her eyes while he made a complete ass of himself.

She took his hand as he pried his eyes open a little wider, smiling down at him while she gave the limp fingers a brisk shake. "Zell Dincht, Bria Jaycen. Nice to meet you. I'm just sorry our second get-together was under less-than-optimal circumstances."

"What are you doing here?"

"I started here just a few days ago; I'm Dr. Kadowaki's new assistant. Fresh out of medical school, so this is my first real job. She seems nice so far, and I haven't had to deal with anything major. Just some scrapes and bruises from training, a broken arm, and," She flashed him another smile, "some overenthusiastic eating. I think I'll survive."

_Things must be a lot quieter in here without Squall and Seifer beating the shit out of each other. _

"Are you feeling a little better?"

"Yeah, I feel really great, actually. In fact, I'm gonna' go get in a few hours in the Training Center--I don't need any weapons so I'll just head straight there from here." _Way to go, numb nuts. Lying around moaning like a pansy after eating too many hot dogs. She must want you bad. _

Zell emphasized the statement by hopping energetically off the table--a brisk movement obviously too much for his sensitive stomach, a fact he demonstrated by puking noisily all over Bria Jaycen's feet.

* * *

Underground Water System

Timber

"_This _is your 'hide-out'?" Seifer demanded curtly, jerking his foot from a puddle of liquid he'd rather not take the time to identify.

Hyperion hung unsheathed and ready at his side, the blade eyed warily by their captive, a scrape of the steely gaze that cheered Seifer slightly, if only for the reason that he enjoyed watching the young man trying not to shit himself.

Encircled by echoing tunnels, enfolded by a dampness that penetrated his jacket and raised thin strands of moisture along his brow, the three worked their way cautiously along the derelict water system, slogging through shin-deep pools of stagnant water in places, leftover remnants from the system's glory days. Seifer could feel rage jabbing its way into the paper-thin veneer of tolerance he'd wrapped himself in, Hyperion's handle growing warm and tantalizing in his contracting fingers.

"Well, at least no one's going to find us here."

He could lift his blade and slide it in there, between the shoulder blades, so easily, like a knife parting butter…

At least such an action would end the kid's whiny commentary. Really, he didn't know why Quistis hadn't flicked the barbed tongue that was Save the Queen at him a few times. She'd threatened him with it more than once, and he damn well wasn't near as irritating as this kid was.

That conjured up a few images that he amused himself with, coaxing back the annoyance that clenched his jaw dangerously. Himself, taking Save the Queen in one hand and snapping the little shit a good one right across the ass…himself, dropping the whip in a coil of deadly leather around the vulnerable neck, squeezing off the whistling flow of Hayden's rattly breath…

He could do it, probably. Quistis was fast, but the dance of gun blades, his sport, his genius, lent him a speed and agility not mirrored in many people. Other than Squall perhaps, and that was a rather sore topic and one he preferred not to dwell on.

However, he'd tasted the acerbic nip of those barbs a few times, and held no desire to do so again. If she reacted too quickly, if she turned her weapon on him…well, his day had progressed shitty enough as it was. No need to add one more pile of crap to the steaming dung heap that was this horrendous day.

Cold water trickled down his boot and settled around his toes. He felt the tingle of dirty liquid along the entire underside of his foot, distracting needle pricks through the skin. He pictured the water forcing its way inside him, curling up through his veins in darkly ominous bubbles, her essence entering him again.

_Seifer. _

The young man blinked, and stumbled a little, earning a quizzical look from Quistis.

_Seifer. _

The weak illumination of the tunnel flared around him. He fell into a blinding whiteness, into a ceaseless void that contained nothing and yet everything-

_-Bowing before her on bended knee, head low in submission-_

_-Her laughter, her grating, horrible laughter, music to his ears-_

_-His hatred, an odious knot in the gut, throbbing and alive, nurtured gently by the clench of her red, red nails against his naked back-_

He was on his knees, seeing nothing and yet everything, with her hand burning bright and heavy against his shoulder, a second sun, a throbbing star that torched through his jacket to the skin beneath. And Hyne he couldn't breathe, couldn't hear, the rush in his ears taking the form of her laughter again-

"Seifer?"

He clung to her voice, grabbing for it like a drowning man, towed to safety on the dulcet strands of that concerned tone. The whiteness receded a little, leaving behind the blue of her eyes and the flush of creamy cheeks.

"Seifer?"

_I'm all right. Get the hell off me. _No he wasn't. He choked on the words, his windpipe knotting around them. They dangled, useless, in his throat, hooked like tiny claws in the flesh there. Quistis slid an arm around his shoulders, as though she expected him to collapse, and he did, into her arms, into that void, while she laughed cruelly at him.

_You never could get away from me. I've always been in you, part of you. You just never realized it. I'm that part of you that can never seem to do any good, that part of you that thrives on chaos and destruction, that part of you incapable of love. _

_I will make that part the whole._

"No!" he screamed with a voice too breathless to register as more than a whisper. "_Leave me the fuck alone, Ulticimea!_"

"Seifer. Seifer, wake up, dammit!"

He felt her shaking him, felt the buzzing twinge in his head dim a little. Her hand on his cheek, gentle and soothing and…stinging.

_Fuck! _The little bitch had just smacked him.

Seifer burst upright, water frothing agitatedly at his ankles, his snarl jarring unevenly off clammy walls. "Dammit, Trepe!"

Still on her knees where she'd sat clutching him, Quistis pushed loose hair from her forehead and studied him intently. "Seifer, what's going on?"

Fuck her eyes, drilling through him with such force, as though she could see straight through him to the rotten core of his soul… 

"_Nothing_." he snapped, bending to retrieve Hyperion. "None of your damn business." The thunder of his angry words hung between them, strident and cutting in the solitude of the lonely place.

_Shit. _he realized after a moment of marveling at just how far silence could stretch. An eternity, spanning an entire galaxy, wrapping the whole world a million times over. He broke that silence with his realization, impaling her with the daggers of his wrathful eyes. "You let that fucking moron get away!"

"I was distracted." she said icily. "Something's wrong with you, Seifer. How long have you been experiencing these seizures?"

Seizures? He stifled a sudden explosion of mirth. _Oh Hyne, if only epilepsy were his problem…_

"They're not seizures, Trepe."

"You need to see a doctor, Seifer. Don't let yourself go on like this-"

"Like you fucking care anyway!" he yelled. "Let them finish the job you couldn't." The coldness in his voice was downright glacial.

Her eyes flared angrily. "I'm trying to help you! Your stubborness is going to get you killed."

"You don't think that's better for everyone?" he demanded bitterly, stabbing Hyperion angrily into his belt loop.

"No I don't." she replied firmly, the resolution of a teacher trying to hammer knowledge into the mind of an obstinate slacker burning in her cheeks. "Why do you think I argued against your execution while everyone else demanded your head on a stick?"

"Because you needed a replacement for Squall and the scar and gun blade were close enough for you?" he shot back nastily.

Quistis shot to her feet and slapped him roughly, the crack of her open palm across his cheek a resounding gunshot in the watery atmosphere. "Go fuck yourself." she spat, the language and raw venom in her voice surprising even him.

Then, without a backward look, she stalked past him into the dark eye of the tunnel where it wound doggedly onward, feet swishing furiously off into the blackness.

Leaving him alone, with his demons, with confusion swirling through the fractures of the cage he locked tight around his heart.

Fucking Trepe; an enigma he would never solve. Nor one he wanted to even attempt to decipher. Fuck Cid and his orders; fuck Garden too, if Cid wanted to kick him out for abandoning Trepe, because there was no way he was following the ungrateful little bitch into an obvious trap.

And good fucking riddance if he never saw her again.

"Rinoa." His fingers picked aside the sweat-damp strands of her hair. Sifted like fine satin through his hand, they fell limply to the soft, exposed shoulders. "Rinoa, look at me. _Please_."

_Squall. _

His face swam above her, pinched and handsome and comforting. She saw panic in those hard blue eyes, terror for her a dark stain across each iris. Under the thick fall of moonlight, his scar gilded in radiant silver, Squall reminded her of a young god carved out of the night itself. The softness in the heavy brow was there now, though only she had ever bothered to see it--the same edge of gentleness repeated in the flinty gaze.

_His body, streaming blood, toppling backward into the starry sky-_

"Squall!" she wheezed into the collar of his fancy dinner jacket, grabbing a fistful of the material in either shaking hand. "Squall." _You're all right. You're safe. _

He hugged her tightly against him. "What's wrong? What happened?"

"I, I saw you--us…in the restaurant." She squeezed her eyes tightly shut against the images, shivering in his embrace.

He didn't say anything for a moment, his lips nestling against the top of her head, the strong arms rocking her as a gentle breeze slowly kissed the nervous sweat from her body. One of her 'visions,' then; she'd experienced them before, since coming into power as a sorceress, although he'd never seen one take her as violently as this one had. He could still feel the anxious tremble of his heart, beating itself heavy and relentless against his ribcage until he feared it might burst free of his chest in a gory mass.

_You're safe now. _he assured her silently, closing his eyes as he turned his face into her fragrant hair.

"What happened?" Squall repeated gently once she'd taken a moment to collect the broken pieces of her emotions, keeping her pressed securely against his chest.

"I saw us…dying." Rinoa said at last, her breath hitching a little on the words, the slender figure beginning to shake again. "You…you proposed to me, and then I was shot in the head. And then you, you…" She slid her hand over his thigh, to lightly touch the important little box in his pocket. He tensed at the contact, at the knowledge of having this most precious of secrets ripped from him like this, but it couldn't be helped now.

He slid one palm down and curved it tenderly over hers, lacing their fingers together.

"And then you were shot too. I couldn't see who did it--there was too much screaming, so much noise…you stood up, and you were shot again, and then you…" She shook her head against him.

"It's all right." he said reluctantly after a moment. Offering solace to a human being still felt clumsy to him, despite Rinoa's patient guidance. He would never extend a gentle and reassuring hand to someone in need of comfort, the way she did, but at least he could hold her while she needed him. That at least he could offer, for as long as she wanted him to.

"We can't go. We can't go, Squall, or we'll die." Rinoa whispered against him.

The night air clung balmy and soft to his skin, but despite the tepid evening, Squall shivered, just a little.

* * *

TV Station

Timber

Midnight found Seifer gazing up at its dark outline, memories and bile swimming inside him.

_This is where it all started. _Where she beckoned to a brash and arrogant young man who underneath the bluster was really only a lost and lonely child. Where he took his first tentative steps into hell, turning his back on the help his old instructor tossed desperately toward him. Like a life vest hurled into the sea beside a man determined to drown himself, floating ignored and forlorn on the crest of foamy waves.

Where he shattered and was born anew, forged from something darker than what crawled in big city alleys during the most dangerous part of night.

_-Quistis, pleading with her eyes as he wandered toward that strange, beautiful figure draped in the purple gauze of finery-_

_-His body humming with an odd electricity, live wires beneath the skin as its glow swelled around him-_

What could he have made himself into, if he hadn't accepted the promises of glory beamed from her eyes? He had risen so far--and while he now recognized the horrors of what he'd done while under her powers, a part of him still lusted for the invincibility he'd submerged himself in. A mere façade, but one that tasted so sweet, liquid utopia on the tongue. His ambitions had always rankled inside him, and to unleash them so freely, without second thought or conscience, lifted a massive weight from the shoulders of Seifer Almasy for the first time in his life.

He hadn't known the weight would grow so much worse once placed back on his shoulders, or he'd have never set it aside in the first place.

The small metal gate leading to the stairs of that fateful place squeaked under his hand. He walked through it, but made no move to ascend the staircase, instead tucking himself down on the first step and hunching against the chill fingers that night probed beneath his jacket.

_-Quistis' mouth, moving but carrying no words to him, the supplication in her eyes flaring hotter, scorching away the ice-_

_Trepe. Fuck. _

He thought he'd long ago stamped his conscience out, an annoying little fire quenched beneath his boot heels, but here it appeared again, reminding him of her earnest defenses during his trials, of the sincerity in her voice as she swore before the court that Seifer Almasy was no traitor, merely a victim like so many others hurt by the war. He saw her stomping haughtily off into that dark sewer where Hayden and his companion no doubt waited in ambush, saw himself stomping just as resolutely in the other direction.

This was how he repaid her. Her patience, her attempts to push him for more, molding him into a man worthy of SeeD rank…He tried not to care. Tried not to picture her choking on her own blood as it gurgled from damaged lungs, tried not to recall the alarm in his voice and heart as she bled out on the sidewalk around them. Trepe was a nuisance, a bore. He could relax just that much more, without her casting little doe-eyed looks of disappointment at him every time she caught him in the midst of some unkind act.

Seifer rubbed his palms across both knees, scowling to himself.

Damn that woman, the way she worked her way beneath his skin, abrading the tender flesh like a splinter chafing maddeningly…

He wouldn't go back for her. She could pull her own ass out of the fire. He'd been given this chance to start fresh, to strike out on his own, away from Garden, away from their incessant stares and whispers. The stars above murmured to him of faraway places and dreams, ones never accomplished if he dwelled in his past.

_I'm not a good man. _Seifer knew this; he could accept it. His ambitions had never included 'being kind;' he hadn't received much compassion in his life--had never allowed himself to, really--so consequently he found the concept only a vague one that he could ignore fairly easily. The world reimbursed with cruelty and suffering, and damn if he was going to feed it gentleness in the hopes of receiving even a tiny sliver of hope that life snatched away just as quickly. Trepe's belief in him, her defense of him when no one else cared to see him live, did not move him. _Your choice, instructor. If you were as smart as everyone says you are, you would have just left it the fuck alone and let them kill me. One less bad guy for you to destroy. _

Hyperion hung with more heaviness than seemed usual along one hip. He felt the coolness of the blade through his pants, shrank slightly away from it as the evening air joined the assault and stabbed him with icy needle pricks.

Somewhere in the distance, Seifer thought he heard laughter.

He kept his eyes on the TV tower where he'd shed one life and thrown on the mantle of another.

Eventually, the air lightened around him, the blood glow of sunrise snagging in the strands of his hair. He watched his hands grow rosy with the light, a faroff train whistle dragging itself through his ears. _Come to me, Seifer. _it seemed to beckon.

_"Come with me, little boy." _

_"Kneel."_

_"Kill them all."_

_"Make all of it yours." _

A stray dog scrounged through the refuge of the alleyway, its shaggy tail giving a brief wag as it glanced in his direction. He ignored the mutt--he considered dogs to be just one more fucking annoyance that he'd rather not put up with--and got slowly to his feet, shaking the tingles from his cramped limbs. One hand drifted instinctively toward Hyperion--the one companion he'd always counted on throughout the years, when he was not even sure of his own alliances. A gun blade never betrayed its master, the same way fickle hearts and minds did.

The train whistle blasted again, followed by the dog's mournful whine.

"Go home." Seifer demanded of it, and let himself back through the gate, the shrill cry of its hinges lingering in his ears for far too long.

* * *

Underground Water System

Timber

"You hit her too hard. Shit, I think she's dead!"

"She's not dead, dumbass, she's still breathing."

"But she's not moving."

"She's _unconscious_, shit for brains. How the hell did you get into Garden anyway?"

"Hey! Leave him alone. You've picked on him enough. We're all on edge, all right?"

"What are we supposed to do with her?"

"Sell her. She's good-looking." Snickers, somewhere in the darkness of her existence.

"Nate!"

"I was just kidding, for Hyne's sake. Not that we couldn't use the money."

"We're _not _selling her."

"I know, I know! I said I was just kidding, all right? Stop looking at me like that."

Quistis' world returned with excruciating slowness, the stale scent of water ripening first in both nostrils, followed by the wafting presence of her own blood. Only the fluttering brush of lashes revealed that she'd opened her eyes, introducing a few cautious flashes of color into the gray fog of her mind.

"Brac! She's awake!"

Never mind 'awake;' she'd already come to that conclusion on her own. Better yet, where the hell was she?

_Seifer screaming in her face, her temper rising, boiling her blood…Stalking through dark tunnels, Save the Queen tapped in rhythmic anger against the palm of her right hand…The stealthy whisper of footsteps behind her…Consuming blackness, snatching her up in cold arms and carrying her off into the dark river of unconciousness…_

She peeled both her eyes fully open to find a set of rich auburn eyes contemplating her from only a few inches away. She started a little at the nearness of that unfamiliar face, whipping a hand for Save the Queen, only to find it missing, the empty loop in her belt giving Quistis a feeling of nakedness.

Set deeply in a face spattered with a light dusting of freckles, pixie-like features tapering downward to a pointed chin and generous, darkly pigmented lips, the eyes stared widely at her. "Wow. Your eyes are really blue."

Quistis blinked. She'd woken up to find herself captured, possibly in enemy territory, and the first sentence spoken to her consisted of a comment about her eyes?

"Where am I?" she demanded.

"I'm sorry I hit you." a voice piped up from one shadowy corner.

"I didn't ask that." she replied as steadily as she could around the dull roar penetrating her temples.

"The same place you were before." the girl in front of her answered, combing thick fingers through boyish black hair. The few strands that hung over her gaze flapped like raven wings at the disturbance, tickling the upturned nose. "You're still in Timber's old sewers, about a mile and a half from the entrance. We've kind of made this our little meeting place for the moment." She gestured around at a few indistinct figures and piles of belongings, equipment stacked in the driest places available in the small chamber.

Slowly, the haze began to clear from Quistis' vision, and she found herself peering through slightly fogged glasses at a group of children.

Hayden Garth stood nearby, one shoulder leaning against the wall at his back, looking on edge, although not nearly as nervous now that Seifer was out of the picture. Quistis supposed she ought to feel a bit miffed that he considered the tempestuous blonde man a larger threat than she, but acknowledged that Seifer cut a far more intimidating figure than she did even if it rankled her pride a little. And, in being honest with herself, she could admit that if she were Hayden and had to choose one of them to fight, she'd most definitely pick herself. She possessed the 'get-it-done' mentality of a trained mercenary and a deadly proficiency with either armed or unarmed combat, but Seifer had that wildness, that unpredictability which had made him such a threat during the war. Combined with his graceful speed, that ferocity transformed him from acerbic youth into one of the most dangerous men alive.

Beside Hayden, a boy who couldn't have been more than sixteen crouched on the balls of his feet, hands clasped between his knees. Heavier in build than the lean Hayden, his face arranged into severe lines, he studied her through narrowed blue eyes deeper in shade than her own, a cold navy that pierced through Quistis like a thousand needle-thin shards of glass. She spent a moment eyeing him coolly back, no sign of intimidation or fear in her own gaze, until he glanced away.

She resumed her scan of the small gathering and found another two boys, twins, identical shades of tousled blonde curls glinting at her above boisterous hazel eyes, and, of course, the black-haired girl still staring curiously at her. Of them all, she placed Hayden as the oldest, at about seventeen, perhaps eighteen, and the twin brothers looked no older than fourteen.

"Where are you all from?" _And where are your parents? _she thought wryly, but refrained from adding that question aloud.

"Trabia Garden." the girl answered. "I'm Jenna, by the way, and those two are Jack and Nathan, plus Brac, and you've already met Hayden."

_Oh for Hyne's sake. Wanna-be soldiers, playing at war games. _"Are you SeeDs?" Quistis asked coldly.

Jenna's plump face wavered a little uncertainly. "No, not yet-"

"You can forget about making SeeD, then. How pleased do you think your headmaster is going to be when he finds out that you've kidnapped one of the instructors from Balamb Garden?"

"We didn't _kidnap _you. Brac said it was the only way to get you here, because it was too dangerous to contact you directly, and you wouldn't believe us anyway!" Jenna cried in protest.

"Belive what?"

"The disappearances. We thought maybe we were just imagining it at first-"

"Jenna." Brac interrupted, silencing her with a look. Clearly the leader of this little band of outlaws, he rose to both feet, towering impressively over the others, taller even than Seifer, Quistis wagered. "Where's the other one?" he demanded to Quistis, folding his arms sternly across a wide chest. "Seifer Almasy."

"Not here, clearly."

"Is he gone?" Brac pressed on, frowning at the sarcasm in her tone.

"Hopefully, for your sake." Quistis responded icily. She was damn sick of this kid trying to push her around.

"He won't get to you in time." Brac warned menacingly.

"Brac--we want her to help us." Jenna cut in, shooting him an annoyed glare. "You're just going to make her mad. And if he's _not _gone, you're in trouble. I've heard stories about him. He was supposed to be executed after the war, remember, because of all the crimes he'd committed?"

Even with her anger at Seifer still churning the pit of her stomach, Quistis tightened up at the girl's words. She fought back the automatic urge to defend him, the faint disgust tingeing Jenna's voice hollowing out a stale pain inside her chest. This was Seifer's fate, for the rest of his life most likely; to be referred to in hushed tones with that strange mixture of revulsion and awe in the speaker's voice, to feel the weight of stares heavy with derision and hatred hot on his back. He was no saint, obviously, and more than once during her stint as his teacher she'd fought the urge to murder him, but in the end he was no worse than the playground bully who enjoyed dropping insects into young girls' hair. The world had seen it in their hearts to forgive Edea, who'd committed even worse crimes than he, but for Seifer there would be no such amnesty.

She wondered, with a distant pang of sorrow for the man he might have become, what it must feel like, waking up each morning to know the entire world hated you.

"What do you know about the man who tried to kill me?" Quistis intervened finally, forcing her way into an argument which had broken out between Jenna and Brac. "Was he hired by your Garden?" _Hyne, I hope not. The shit's really going to hit the fan then…_

"No." Hayden piped in, sticking his hands into both pockets. He didn't look directly at her.

"Then what do you know about him? Do you at least know who removed his body?"

"It probably got up and walked away on its own." Jenna murmured.

"What?" Quistis asked sharply.

The girl shared a glanced with the golden-haired twins. "Nothing. Just some rumors…Never mind. Anyway, we came to find you because…we don't have anyone else to trust. We can't go to anyone in Garden with this. And everything we'd heard about you made us think that…well, I mean, you're famous, and students we've had transfer over from Balamb always talk about how nice you are…"

Quistis shook her head in disbelief. "So you belive this gives you the right to lure me underneath Timber, knock me unconscious, and interrogate me about my companion's whereabouts?"

"Almasy's a traitor." Brac returned coldly. "Everyone knows that. I don't want him here; he'll take the information and turn around and give it to the people we're trying to keep it from."

"You don't know me either; you know a legend. I think you're intelligent enough to realize that those are usually exaggerated. I might be as much a traitor as you claim Seifer to be."

"I doubt it." Brac said cynically. "It'd be pretty difficult to manage that."

Quistis let that pass with a sigh. "What are these disappearances that you're so concerned about?"

"Responsible kids who never miss a day not showing up for class--without ever being heard from again. People getting snatched right out of their dorm rooms. We think they're--"

"Getting sneaked into the basement, where horrendous experiments are performed on them." Quistis finished tiredly.

Jenna blinked. "How did you know that?"

"The older students at B. Garden have used it as a scare tactic on new recruits for years. It's nothing more than a children's bedtime story, and something you should all be too old to fall for."

"It's not a story this time." Brac replied sharply. "We think there's genetic testing going on with students from Trabia Garden being used as guinea pigs--and that man who tried to assasinate you was-"

He paused mid-sentence, the reverberation of a shot hanging in the air, in Quistis' ears for a moment before she identified the sound.

Gunfire, close, although muted, as though it echoed from aboveground.

"_Shit_. We have to go. _Now_." Brac snapped.

"No one's going to think to come snooping down here; we're safest just waiting-" Jenna began.

"No!" he barked, voice smashing sharply against the walls surrounding them, bouncing gravelly and harsh throughout the small chamber. "Everyone grab your stuff. Let's go."

"And me?" Quistis asked, keeping her voice purposefully mild.

"Find your own way out."

"That's an interesting way to treat someone who's identified all of you and can report this little incident to Trabia Garden."

Hayden paused in the act of hauling a backpack across his shoulders, and looked meaningfully at Brac, already partially into the connecting tunnel. "She's right."

"Shit. Then take her with us!"

"No." Quistis said calmly, and slid the rope binding her wrists free, the skin scraped and raw from its chafing, the coil dropping soundlessly at her feet. "Please return my weapon to me. I don't want to have to go get it."

"Garth, grab her and move your ass!" Brac barked, and disappeared.

Hayden lingered, torn, Save the Queen poking from the large compartment of his pack.

"Hayden, don't let yourself get mixed up in whatever nonsense Brac is preaching." she advised him gently.

He shook his head furiously. "It's not nonsense. Look, I'll get in touch with you. Later, ok? I know where to find you. Here." He tossed her the whip, stared at her a second longer, then turned and fled the room, his sloshing footsteps dying away deep into the belly of the water system in only a few moments.

He tucked himself into the shadows falling thick and ash-like between a quaint bookstore and small cottage, and loosened Hyperion in its sheath.

A bullet careened off the brick only a few inches from his head, snatching away slivers of red that pelted Seifer's collar bone with small pinpricks of pain. He swore and rolled deeper into concealing silhouettes, hand tight around his weapon, that familiar anger pounding itself against the sides of his head.

His pursuers materialized in the town square a moment later, anger clouding youthful features.

They'd surrounded him while he waited for the next train out of Timber, loud, slightly drunk Galbadian soldiers that reminded Seifer of himself before the war, full of arrogance, strutting and stupid. Completely unaware of how the world really worked, how free will was only a humerous joke offered up by the universe. Trying to remain inconspicuous for once, minding his own damn business, he'd sworn as one of them suddenly called out in a grating, annoying-as-hell voice, "Hey? Isn't that that guy from the Sorceress War? Seifer Almassy?"

"That's Al_mas_y, prick."

"What'd you just call me?"

And so on and so forth. Guy had an even more hair trigger temper than he did, taking a swing at Seifer's head after a few of his most minor snide remarks, then getting really pissed when Seifer ducked and proceeded to wrench the guy's arm behind his back and plant him face first in the dirt. His buddies hadn't taken too well to such an insult to one in uniform, and thus the hunt was on. Whether they shot at him now out of wounded pride or some half-assed notion of carrying out the justice the court systems had failed to administer, he didn't really know, nor did he care.

But he was starting to get pretty fucking pissed.

He stretched out a palm, bright leaping tendrils of orange gathering at its center. "Fira."

The flaming globe smashed into the leg of one young man, jerking him half around with a yelp, the motion unblancing him and sprawling the lanky form flat-out on cobbled pavement. The gun in his hand stitched a messy row of bullets across his sanctuary, staccato booms that sliced through the swirling dust and grit of Seifer's hideout.

_That's enough of that shit. _

He ripped Hyperion free, the blade a shiny missile aimed straight at the fallen man's crumpled body, a silvery beacon guiding the other's shots. More shavings of faded crimson stone rained down on top of his head, dried blood flecks against the blonde contradiction of his hair.

Seifer ignored them, finger closing smoothly around the trigger.

Hyperion boomed powerfully; he swayed slightly with the recoil, watching in satisfaction as the asshole on the ground released a scream and clutched his hand, three of the fingers blown clean off, firearm lying on the pavement a few feet away where he'd reflexively tossed it.

The leader of the little band ducked out of view to reload, one of the others going to aid the injured man, a fourth fleeing into the shadows of a nearby building, tail tucked firmly between his legs.

Seifer watched him go in disgust. _Never been in a battle before in his fucking life. Probably worked his way through the army on daddy's money. _

He thrust out his free hand once more, the gun blade hanging loosely at his side now, thundaga gathering in the callused crevices of his palm as the two men still in plain view stumbled upright, the one he'd wounded still shrieking.

Behind them, catching his eye just as he was about to release the spell, five teenagers darted across the square, hauling ass for all they were worth.

_What the hell? _He closed his fingers tightly around the coalescing storm, burning himself with a muttered curse, the spell dispersing through his veins and mildly jolting his system before vanishing. He knew the last one, Seifer realized. The little shit he and Quistis had tied up and marched through Timber's underground water system.

No Trepe, though. _Shit. _

Seifer threw caution to the winds, lunging out into the square, firing as he ran, swinging Hyperion around to target the leader as a twitch of movement grabbed his attention. He aimed to incapacitate rather than kill-Hyne knows the last thing he needed was another body added to his mountainous count, even if it was self defense; who would believe him anyway--and glanced a round superficially off the man's left shoulder.

He took advantage of the momentary lull as the youth stumbled back, and, lunging, grasped a fistful of Hayden's shirt, nearly hauling him off both feet as he sprinted for cover.

"Get off me!" the gray-eyed teen screamed, the earlier cool he'd displayed in the diner gone, doused from his manner by the rough clench of Seifer's powerful hand.

The ex-knight dragged them both onto the door stoop of a rustic shop with a weathered 'Closed' sign hanging crookedly in its window, then with the butt of Hyperion, smashed the glass and snaked a hand in to unlock the door.

He whipped Hayden in after him and slammed the boy into the wooden countertop directly in front of them, his weapon sweeping forward to kiss the arched and exposed neck. "What did you do with Quistis?"

"Get off me!" he repeated angrily, a little defiance showing around the white-rimmed irises.

He hadn't lost all his bluster then. Good for him. Not that Seifer gave a fuck, nor was it going to do him a bit of good.

"Not the answer I was looking for." he said, shaking his head, and sliced a thin cut into the side of Garth's straining throat. "Tell me what the fuck you did to Trepe, or the next time this thing's going all the way across your fucking windpipe."

Hayden glimpsed the sincerity of the threat in that emerald gaze, and held both hands up. "Fine. Fine, dammit!" he yelled as Seifer dug the point just a little deeper. "I didn't do anything to her. She's still down there, where we left her. She's fine. I even gave her back her whip. Want to let me go now?"

"How do I know you're not lying to me?"

"I'm not, I swear, ok man? Look, I need to catch up with my friends. Miss Trepe's fine, I swear to Hyne. We wouldn't hurt her. She's probably already back aboveground somewhere."

The store's remaining window, leaking in a few cheerful rays of sunlight, suddenly exploded in a million stinging shards.

Seifer's nimble gaze immediately latched onto the dark sphere that sailed through its jagged outline, the sunlight catching on those few pieces of glass clinging stubbornly to its frame and reflecting brilliantly against his eyes. Diamonds set in a luminous gold backdrop, dancing red spots before his eyes.

He smashed a hand into Hayden's chest, forcing the young man with a cry over the counter.

Seifer felt its blast, heard the detonation of it as wood and metal blew apart, flung upward to rain down around them, glowing with the cherry pulse of melted steel.

He flew, a bird suspended on a mighty surge of wind, winging through feathery clouds into a blackness that clouted him soundly in the chest, crushing every ounce of breath from his body before the same blackness mercifully consumed him.

* * *

It took Quistis less time than she would have guessed to discover a way out, a ladder leading up to a still partially open manhole cover appearing only a hundred feet or so down the corridor the teens had fled into.

She heard gunshots the second she emerged into Timber's fresh morning air.

Her first instinct was one of concern, that perhaps those children had gotten themselves mixed up in something far beyond their disorganized abilities. The next, suspicion, as shouting followed the richochet of bullets and, shading her eyes against the sun, she saw a familiar flash of blonde in the midst of chaos.

_Seifer. Dammit. _

She let him out of her sight for a single night, and already he'd gotten himself into trouble. How typical of her former student.

_Where the hell are the guards? _No one seemed to be attempting to interfere--then again, if anyone had bothered to look into the situation and recognized the ex-knight, they'd probably deduced it safest just to stay out of the way.

They would be right, Quistis thought with a sigh, but if she allowed this to proceed, with possible damage done to nearby buildings, or, Hyne forbid, any people, B. Garden would have a shitstorm on their hands to clean up. With her name dragged through the middle of it all. Seifer may have been assigned as her bodyguard, but she was not naive enough to believe that Cid's trust stretched far enough to allow the troublesome man to destroy the tranquility of a peaceful little town.

Quistis hauled herself out onto the street, kicking the manhole cover across the opening behind her, Save the Queen already in one hand as she darted to both feet.

_I'm going to kill him. _And she sincerely meant that this time; her earlier anger with him had not yet cooled, and already he'd discovered yet another way to provoke the normally calm young woman. The moment she resolved this, he'd find Save the Queen shoved down his throat, gagging that insufferable mouth of his--

Seifer sprinted out into the middle of the street, shooting Hyperion at a man lurking in the shadows of a charming little apartment building, wounding him just seriously enough to slow the man while he barreled toward shelter. She watched him grab the startled Hayden Garth, watched him yank the unfortunate young man into a nearby shop, breaking into a run now as well.

Less than pleased with Hayden herself, Quistis would nevertheless never forgive herself if she allowed Seifer to hurt him.

She glimpsed movement, saw the man Seifer had just injured slinking from his haven, murder a polished glaze in the furious eyes.

The window of the shop shattered with a single angry thrust of his boot; she moved, but far too slowly, Save the Queen unfurling outward to snap around his wrist as he cocked one arm and released, the ominous globe soaring through the gap he'd just created.

Steel barbs dug deep, hooking in the skin, shredding tendons with the wet tear of flesh.

He screamed as Quistis yanked, folding to his knees, clawing wildly at the viscous rivers of burgundy that seeped down his arm.

She pulled him toward her with a supple flick of the wrist, dragging him away from the window as fear jammed burning fingers into her heart and ripped savagely. "Seifer!"

The grenade exploded; the wave of its heat blasted through the window, taking her in the shoulder as she turned from it, crisping the sleeve of her shirt. The force of it shoved Quistis off her feet, sprawling her across her stomach beside the fallen soldier, glass pelting her back.

The building smoked foully.

She shot to her feet, retrieving her weapon, its tip dangling at her feet as she ran, not bothering to coil it up. Hyne, he'd been in there, they'd both been in there, in the charred husk of that shop…

A few thin tongues of flame lapped scornfully at her from the ruined window. Hayden was far too young to die in such a horrible manner, and Seifer…she couldn't even contemplate that right now. He was a presence in her life, and though far from a pleasant one, he was still _there_, existing, the thorn in her side that she never could pluck free.

Quistis stepped through the doorway, avoiding the falling cinders of the door's scorched remnants.

The widened silver of a terrified gaze greeted her as she kicked her way past fallen debris, the young man standing on both feet now, swaying a little as he gripped the counter in the white-knuckled grasp of one who acknowledges his close brush with death.

She didn't see Seifer.

Her boot nudged something long and solid; Hyperion skittered across the floor in front of her, coming to rest a few feet from a pile of collapsed wooden beams.

And protruding from that pile…one of his boots, sooty and torn, a mangled toe visible, peeled down to the bone, red streaked white that glistened at her.

She fought against the nauseated clench of her stomach.

"He's dead." Hayden said breathlessly. "He shoved me out of the way, and now he's dead-"

Quistis reined in the surprising emotions that rippled through her, and composed her face in serene lines. She took pity on the upset teen, clipping Save the Queen to her belt, trying not to think about her heart and how coarsely it jumped around in her chest, or his heart, which probably had ceased to move completely. "Get out of here, Hayden." she told him calmly. "Go back to your Garden and forget about this--it's a mess you don't want to clean up."

"I'm, I'm sorry--I didn't, I mean…he just _shoved _me, and then it went off, and there was nothing…there was nothing…" He clutched solid wood more tightly to keep from crumpling.

"No one blames you. Leave. Now."

She heard his boots tapping out a reluctant rhythm across the floorboards after a long moment, and turned to the grisly task of unearthing her companion, that single pulverized toe raising the bile in her throat once again. It glided, hot and thick, into her mouth, burning each corner with its vitriolic acid.

_Oh Seifer…_

Abrupt sadness stung her chest; Quistis gulped a steadying breath and sank down beside him.

There was nothing glorious about this type of death, nothing romantic or befitting of his grand ambitions. This was ghastly, messy; she dreaded seeing that handsome face flayed down to the high cheekbones, his skull grinning madly up at her through hanging tatters of flesh.

Warmth in her eyes, in the pit of her gut, Quistis whisked away the sweat beading across her forehead, and grabbed for the first of three beams, rocking it forward and then leveraging it off him with a heavy grunt. Dust and the smoky flakes of burned wood spiraled upward, chasing one another in dizzying corkscrews toward the ceiling.

The air cleared, gradually, to reveal fogged emerald staring blearily up at her.

Quistis nearly screamed, the shock of that intent gaze searing into her jerking the young woman forward, almost into his lap. She braced herself at the last moment, her body propped above his, the same way the beams were, she realized after a moment of studying them. They'd fallen just so, tenting his body, one supporting the other to actually form a sort of shield across his prone figure. His face, streaked with grime, sported a number of small lacerations and he no doubt suffered from a concussion judging by the unfocused glaze of his eyes, but Hyne, he was _alive_.

It was the first time she could ever remember wanting to embrace him.

"Hold on. I'm getting you out of here. Do you recognize me, Seifer?" Quistis asked him as she carefully continued digging him free, cautious not to shift the pile and collapse the entire thing directly on top of him. "Do you know who I am?"

"Trepe." he murmured, eyes flickering.

"Yes. Stay awake please. Seifer? I need you to keep your eyes open." _Keep your eyes open, Hyne, please, keep your eyes open, because I'm so afraid right now that if you close them, you won't open them again…_

"Can you tell me where you're injured? Can you feel your legs?"

"…toe fucking hurts…" he mumbled.

That was good; at least he wasn't paralyzed.

"Does it hurt to breathe? Are your arms all right?"

He blinked unsteadily at her. "…the fuck is that whiny little bitch?"

"Hayden's fine, just a little shaken up." Quistis felt her lips twitch a little despite the situation, a new and surprising tenderness swelling inside her for the young man as he clung tenaciously to consciousness. The question hadn't been voiced in the most genial manner, but the fact that he'd uttered it meant he at least cared whether or not the young man lay in pieces around him, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

_"He shoved me out of the way, and now he's dead-" _

From power-hungry madmen to savior. Quistis gave a slight shake of her head as she scooped the final puddle of rubble off his body. Would she ever really understand just what made Seifer Almasy tick?

She noticed the eyes flicker uncertainly again, twitching toward the heavy pull of slumber.

"No!" She grasped him by both shoulders and half-raised him out of the smoking amalgamation of wood and dust, cradling his large frame as best she could. He slumped forward against her, chin clunking down on top of her shoulder, hair tinged with the sharp odor of smoke. It snaked up her nostrils, a pungent sting in her senses.

"Seifer. Seifer!" Quistis barked, jostling him gently.

"…hurts to breathe…" he mumbled against her.

_Shit. _

"You have to help me. I can't pick you up by myself. Seifer, please. Wake up."

"Let us take care of him. He's going to be coming with us anyway." a stern voice intervened.

Quistis snapped her head around to find four men in official-looking uniforms peering grimly around the wreckage, the speaker's compassionless glare fastened on Seifer's drooping blonde head. She recognized them as local law enforcement officers, an uneasy suspicion percolating in the pit of her stomach as they studied him unkindly.

"If you would just point me toward the nearest hospital-"

"He won't be going to the hospital. This young man killed several innocents--aside from the hundreds of others he killed during the war, of course. Timber hangs criminals like him, and Garden won't get in the way this time."

The color drained from Quistis' face. "He didn't kill anyone--one man was wounded superficially, and it was done in self-defense." She bit her lip against the possible lie. She couldn't be sure of that, but she figured--hoped--he was smart enough to refrain from deliberately provoking fights, considering the kind of negative attention that would bring to him. He was most likely right that several contracts existed on his head, and pulling high profile stunts that alerted people to his whereabouts would be unbearably stupid.

"Take a look, young lady." the man in the doorway offered gravely, stepping aside while his three companions filtered into the small shop, fanning out around the half-conscious form of Seifer, draped gently across her lap now.

She glanced down at him, wondering if in his state of near unconsciousness he understood any of what transpired.

Lowering his head gingerly to the floor, Quistis rose to her feet and crept into the doorway.

Laid out before her in a neat row, the bodies of Jenna, Brac, Nathan and Jack stared blankly into a cheerful sky, congealing blood pooled beneath the prone figures, death scrawled with hideous casualness across pale features. Jenna's throat gaped in the bloody smile of a severed windpipe, Brac's chest opened to the muscle of his stopped heart, the twins dispatched with similar injuries.

_No. _For Hyne's sake, Seifer hadn't done this; she'd spotted the four sprint safely through the square ahead of Hayden, right? She'd kept him in her sight since then; this was not his handiwork, this was not--Quistis stared helplessly at the frowning officer.

No one was going to believe her, famous SeeD Quistis Trepe or not. They'd already marked Seifer for death; she saw it in their unforgiving eyes.

The man she'd wounded with Save the Queen was nowhere to be seen. _A set-up? _she wondered vaguely. _Did he kill them and frame Seifer for the deed? _

Behind her, she heard the rustle of clothing, the scrape of dragging boots against wooden floorboards. She knew without turning that they'd hauled him off the ground, held him propped less-then-gently between them. Resistance stirred inside her, warring with the quiet introversion that was Quistis Trepe, her natural inclincation to avoid any unpleasant scenes.

"I can't let you do that."

"Don't interfere." the man standing in front of her warned.

Too late. Before any of them could blink, she'd landed an efficient blow to the man's head that dropped him in a comatose heap beside the dead children. Save the Queen snapped out as she pirouetted, whistling around to twine securely around another man's neck. She yanked him toward her with a brisk pull, and he dropped his half of Seifer, the ex-knight collapsing to both knees, the sound of his fall drowned by the crack of Quistis' skull against her victim's, the head butt knocking him out cold.

The other two released Seifer and reached for their weapons.

She leapt nimbly toward one, catching him in the chest with a well-placed boot, slamming the wind out of him. She touched down briefly, the other foot already swinging around in a roundhouse kick that sent him into deep slumber.

Barely breathing hard, Quistis spun around to confront the final man, and found herself staring down the barrel of a gun for the second time in only a little over a week.

She dodged, too late. _Too late, too late, Quistis, dammit…_

Blue eyes squeezed shut to await the explosion of pain flaying open her chest, the boom echoing strangely tinny and unnatural in her ears, pulled taut through her very veins as her entire body tensed in expectation. She felt nothing, and that brought a slight sense of relief, that at least her end had not come painfully, had not lingered hellishly before at last extending the forgiving hand of Death.

"The fuck did you do, Trepe?" Seifer rasped.

_What? _

Heart hammering in her ears, Quistis pried her eyes open to see him still kneeling on the floor, one hand extended, holding Hyperion steadily, the man lying across the flat of the blade where he'd landed after tripping over it.

She fisted her weapon shakily in one hand. _I don't know. Hyne, I don't know. _


	7. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

Commander Leonhart's Office

Balamb Garden

Squall stared dismally into the black iris of his coffee, and dropped his scarred forehead onto an open palm with a sigh. The thready tick of his watch slithered in both ears, taking the form of a malevolent hiss that chipped determinedly away at his sanity. He could sense that noise taking on a life of its own, warping into something throbbing with a malignant evil, the same wickedness that beat beneath Seifer's chest.

Seifer, whom Quistis had disappeared with nearly a week ago now, amidst reports of assaults on four law enforcement officers and the slayings of four young teenagers in Timber.

Hyne, did he have a situation on his hands. If he thought the public had screamed for Seifer Almasy's death before…it was a single drop in the ocean of reports he received daily from government officials now, all ordering that Garden stop harboring a fugitive, students blithely informing him that Seifer needed to die, concerned citizens demanding he be apprehended so that they might feel safe again. And through it all, not a single word from Quistis, the most responsible and reliable person he knew, which meant she was probably dead or…dead. He couldn't exactly see her willingly running away with Seifer for some sort of romantic getaway.

Squall tried to ignore the pang introduced to his fluttering heart at the thought of Quistis' death. He focused instead on his anger, on the pleasure of thrusting his gun blade straight through the heart of that traitor, standing triumphant over the young man as his blood ran in the streets, victory a siren song in his veins…

A gentle knock snapped the young commander from images of bloody vengeance.

She slid into his office with that kind smile, the one that burned only for him, warm and so overflowing with love for _him _of all people that he felt himself relax, just slightly. His ring sparkled as a second sun on her finger, the facets of the gemstone set in the simple, elegant band capturing a thousand points of light from the lamp on his desk and raking them in dazzling streamers across his eyes.

He blinked away the intrusion of light into his pupils and offered her a lukewarm smile of greeting.

"How ya' doing?" Rinoa asked, perching on the single bare corner of desk not completely occupied by mounds of paperwork.

He raked a hand through his hair with another sigh and just shook his head. "Are _you _all right?" She hadn't slept well since the vision of their assassination in the restaurant; twice now Squall had woken, one hand clasped in readiness around the handle of his weapon, to the quiet sound of his door opening and that slender, raven-haired figure sliding into his room on a bar of light from the hall outside. He studied her now with concern, the pale features even whiter than normal, the bruised smudge of fatigue standing out starkly beneath both wide eyes.

"I'm worried about Quistis and Seifer." she replied honestly.

"Don't give _him _any of your sympathy." Squall said, looking away as darkness crawled in his heart. He wondered if this was how Seifer felt each day, the grimy little fingers of revenge and hatred pulling apart his mind and his soul. But then again, Squall couldn't be certain the ex-knight had ever possessed a soul; perhaps those black fingers had only dismembered his mind then, fracturing it into pieces that would never re-form. Seifer's brain was the shattered glass of a mirror lying facedown on a hardwood floor, his sanity scattered like unwanted refuse at his feet.

Rinoa reached out and lightly touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. "You don't know that he had anything to do with what happened in Timber."

"There are eyewitnesses. Reliable ones. And the two of them never came back; Quistis was only going to Timber for the day, to do some research. She should have been back by now." _Except she's not, because he probably killed her, the way he does with most things that piss him off or get in his way. _

"You're the one who's always going on about how unreliable eyewitnesses are." she pointed out, trying another of her smiles on him.

He ignored that comment, and glanced down at the stack of papers threatening to topple sideways into his coffee mug. He tossed back the rest of his beverage, stone cold now, and moved it away, the motion a scratchy sigh in the quiet of his office.

"Squall, let's go for a walk. You've been shut up in here all day."

He shook his head, not looking at her. "Too much work to do." His voice held a brusqueness that he knew would hurt her feelings; he hadn't meant the words to emerge so coldly, but with everything weighing so heavily on him right now, he hadn't the presence of mind to temper his usual detachment.

The wound in her eyes hurt him. He set his pen aside after hesitating a moment and stretched out his hand for hers, running a callused thumb idly across the engagement ring.

"It's all right." Rinoa said quietly after a moment, sensing the apology in the gesture. "I know how worried you must be right now. Quistis has been your friend for a long time…practically your sister."

"I knew letting her go off with Seifer was a mistake." Squall mumbled bitterly. "I don't know what Cid was thinking."

"He was thinking that everyone deserves a second chance. I don't think Seifer killed those people. I know he did some bad things during the war, but it really wasn't his fault; he was being controlled, and I think, deep down, he feels guilty about it all. It's probably why he came back to Garden. To redeem himself somehow, even if he doesn't want to admit it."

"He came back to Garden because no one else would take him." Squall said coldly. He pulled his hand away. Talking about Seifer with Rinoa always agitated him like this; sometimes it seemed to him that the green-eyed blonde could do no wrong in her eyes, and that reminded him that once they'd shared a summer together as a couple, with Rinoa believing she'd been 'in love' with him. _That _rankled, lemon juice in a paper cut, sharp and stinging like the prick of broken glass. To think that Seifer, of all people, had stroked the soft black hair first, kissed her smiling lips--it made Squall want to ram his gun blade down the man's throat, a rage that had nothing to do with all the other horrible acts he'd committed. Somehow those seemed to pale in comparison when he pictured the two of them with their arms around each other, smiling into the orange fire of a beach sunset.

A hurt look crossed her face again.

Stiffly, he picked up his pen once more and set to work signing several documents from the smallest pile in front of him. She waited patiently for a few minutes, expecting him to speak again, or touch her gently perhaps, and when he did neither, Rinoa finally slid from his desk and let herself quietly out. She knew better than to hound him mercilessly when he got into these moods.

He watched her leave beneath lowered eyelashes.

The pen scratched valiantly away for a few more minutes, time dragging itself along like an aging corpse. Then the thoughts intruded again, swirling in his mind like the dizzying eddies of a sandstorm, and he gave up on his work, the forehead going again to the hand, retribution and loathing fermenting in his stomach while his watch ticked its way toward the day's end.

* * *

Motel

Glacen City

Watching her sleep, he stirred a spiral of gold and tucked it ever-so-lightly behind a delicate ear, fragrant silk in his rough fingers.

Lying like that, curled into fetal position with hands balled under one cheek, Quistis reminded him of the small child he'd known back at Matron's orphanage, the one who'd bossed him around and cried when he kicked over her sand castles and pulled the heads off her dolls. With the eyes closed and the glasses set carefully on the broken-down nightstand and the lashes tucked like the finely-spun gauze of a spider's web into the hollows beneath her eyes, she looked so unlike herself that Seifer almost couldn't relate the sleeping figure to his old instructor. Without the hardness stabbing out from those eyes, without the lips pinched into a tight line as he pissed her off, she appeared…delicate, almost.

His eyes went to her pale throat, and the pulse beating slow and lazy in the side of her neck.

He'd tried to extinguish that once. Once he would have gladly taken the gun blade shining at him from one murky corner of the shithole room and driven it through that flickering heartbeat. Once he would have laughed while she bled red rivers into his hands. Probably would have felt like shit afterward when the sorceress at last relinquished her hold on him and he was himself once more, but Hyne would he have enjoyed it at the time.

Seifer flung himself down beside her on the bed, tucking his hands behind his head. The place smelled, and he'd identified at least three different life forms growing in the shower stall, but at least the warmth of her body burned all that unpleasantness away for a while. And it wasn't as though they could show up at the city's swankiest hotel and ask for a room and would they please charge it to B. Garden's account? Fugitives didn't have many options open aside from an assortment of rodent-infesed little slices of hell where no one asked questions, no matter how much blood you walked in wearing.

The young woman beside him sighed, and murmured something in her sleep.

He stared at the back of her head.

Quistis Trepe, on the run with him, evading justice. If that wasn't the most fucked up thing he'd ever heard, then Seifer adored small children and aspired toward a life as a gardener. Best of all, he was actually the innocent one this time--she'd assaulted those officers all on her own, and he hadn't touched those damn kids. All right, she'd disabled those pricks to, inexplicably, save _his_ ass, but still. He hadn't thought she had it in her.

And now, for the past week, they'd spent long hours in one another's company, snapping at each other, hopping trains and holing up in shitty little places like this one, living off funds he'd stolen from a drunk outside a bar several towns back. (He hadn't mentioned that part to her, of course, neglecting to mention where he'd gotten the money. Maybe Trepe could stretch her morals enough to beat up a few police officers in the name of keeping him alive, but he doubted robbery fit into her neatly organized rules.)

At least their constant moving kept her that much safer; whoever wanted her dead would find it much harder to ferret her out when they never stayed in once place for more than a couple of nights, though he didn't think this little adventure did much for her spiritually. She looked more and more haunted each day, and whether that was due to her gnawing conscience or the fact that she'd been forced to put up with him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Seifer didn't ask.

But he observed more than she thought he did. In fact, he found himself starting to pick up on some of her little quirks, traits she must have displayed in the classroom but ones he couldn't remember noticing before. Of course, he tried to block out most of his memories occurring any earlier than this year. Better just to leave those buried; they belonged in the shadows, underground, the same way corpses did.

Just little things, ones he shouldn't care about but picked up on all the same. The way she cocked her head to the left, ever so slightly, when asking a question, that wrinkle between her eyebrows as she pondered something, the twitch of her right hand when she thought really hard about some subject. She chewed her nails, too, an anxious habit he never would have imagined from her. Those ragged little stubs seemed so…untidy on her. Fitting for someone like him, who crawled on hands and knees through the stinking underbelly of life, but completely out of place on the pristine flawlessness of his old instructor.

He was starting to learn she wasn't nearly as perfect as Trepies everywhere proclaimed her to be. Oh, he'd always known that, had reveled in pointing out the rare mistakes she did make during training, but somehow, deep down, Seifer thought he too had doubted there was really much wrong with Quistis. A fucking robot with a nice body, too cold to really be defective, the way he was.

But there was a human under the ice queen. One who blinked up at the ceiling for long hours during the night, shadows in her eyes, one who tucked blankets gently over him while he lay half-in, half-out of slumber shivering from the memories that scraped their claws down his spine.

He wondered if she'd picked up on some of his foibles as well, if she noticed the same shadows repeated in his own gaze.

He wondered what had put the shadows in her eyes.

She stirred again, and he could tell this time by the change in her breathing that she'd awakened. She would probably be pissed that he was lying next to her--Hyne forbid any part of him touch her; he might infect her, poison the squeaky cleanliness that was Quistis Trepe.

He didn't really give a shit. The nightmares--memories, really--he lived through each night penetrated much deeper than any of Quistis' whining. If he could survive them, drag himself out of bed each morning and function normally--normally for him at least--he could damn well endure a little pissiness.

"I'm hungry." she announced, voice a little scratchy with sleep.

That surprised him a little, both because she'd barely touched food in the past few days and also because she didn't even mention that his elbow was currently touching hers, his hip jammed up against hers on the narrow bed. "So? I'm not your fucking butler." _Oops. _He hadn't really meant it to come out like that, but old habits died hard Seifer supposed.

Quistis rolled onto her side and eyed him evilly. "Charming. I was just stating a fact, not ordering you to bring me breakfast in bed."

"It's almost midnight, anyway."

She said nothing to that for a long time; he thought she'd fallen asleep again, the blue eyes shuttered away behind those lashes again. Breath lifted her chest gently and dropped it once more, a lazy ascent and descent that drew his attention despite himself. He noticed just how close they were pressed, with nothing but the shabby drape of his trench coat between them, worn too thin in places to really count as an effective barrier.

_Damn. _He really needed to get laid, if sitting on a bed next to Quistis was distracting him.

"Is this how it feels to be you?" she murmured quietly, in the indolent tone of one just on the hazy verge of sleep.

Seifer blinked at that, and turned his head to look at her again. "What?"

"…always running, looking over your shoulder, knowing that somewhere out there someone hates you so much they want you dead…Do you ever get tired…of running from yourself…and everyone else?"

He didn't know how to answer that. There was a rawness to her voice that tugged at his chest in a way he didn't feel like thinking about. _No one hates you. I've always been the scapegoat; no one really wanted to punish Edea all that much because she's sweet and pretty and children love her. And I'm just a fucking failure, so why not pin everything on me anyway? It's not like I'm going to do anything useful with my life, right? _

Bitterness tainted the thought, but another emotion pushed through as well, and for a moment he wanted to tell her to leave him and head back to Garden. He couldn't prove his innocence, and even if he could he had the suspicion that any evidence might mysteriously disappear before his trial. Or more likely, he'd disappear, gutted in the dark corner of some jail by guards convinced they were doing their civic duty by ridding the world of Seifer Almasy. But that was all right; really, he acknowledged that after all he'd done, this was probably the life he deserved, catching rare hours of sleep in places growing previously undiscovered plantlife, skulking through the slime and rot of various cities' worst neighborhoods until finally someone shoved a knife through his ribs and left him to die alone in a dirty alleyway.

Quistis, however, did not deserve that. She needed Garden, needed its military precision and her fucking paperwork and her teaching. They'd believe her, if she showed up claiming Seifer had attacked those officers in Timber and then kidnapped her; the officers might argue, but who would believe a few hick-town policemen over Quistis Trepe, SeeD extraordinaire and savior of the world? A few, perhaps, but no one important. And no one would dispute _his_ guilt.

He opened his mouth to make that very suggestion, then closed it again. Much as she might dislike him, Quistis would never betray him like that. If he could say anything about Trepe, at least she took responsibility for her own actions. In a million years she wouldn't allow him to take the fall for her.

_Why were you willing to take the fall for her anyway, asshole? _Seifer thought, scowling to himself.

Suddenly disgusted with himself, he slid off the bed, jerked his coat from where it had somehow become entangled around her, and stabbed both arms angrily into it. That woke her up again; she'd drifted off seemingly in the middle of uttering those words, but now the blue gaze blinked alertly up at him.

"Where are you going?"

"Out." he snarled, and slammed the door behind him.

He lurked in the shadows, watching the dilapidated building and craving a cigarette.

Three cities and an entire week of his life wasted and he'd finally caught up to them, tracking the couple to this dingy motel that appeared on the verge of falling down at any moment. He'd taken up position outside it, watching the front and only exit, and then settled in to wait.

And wait.

A patient man, even he found frustration chewing a serrated hole into him, whispering enticing little suggestions to him to strike now, sneak in under the mantle of night and slit both their throats while they slept. But no, that wouldn't do. The woman was dangerous enough alone, but with the addition of her companion, he couldn't risk something so brazen. Men like that didn't sleep, or when they did, it was with one eye craked open, just waiting for something to happen.

He wasn't sure even his skills could overcome both of them in a head-on fight.

But Hyne, was he bored.

He found himself rewarded after a few more minutes of mindless tedium, alarm bells buzzing inside his brain as a young blonde man he recognized instantly slinked out the front door, the collar of his coat turned up at the throat, fierceness etched between his eyebrows. Not a man who would be bothered most likely, even in a neighborhood such as this; the 6' 2" frame screamed 'dangerous' and each flap of his coat presented a small peek of Hyperion. One would have to be either really drunk or stupid to attempt a frontal assault, and the man doubted even a stealth attack from the pools of inky darkness would end well for the assailant. Men like Almasy smelled trouble; they thrived on it, and consequently knew how to recognize it.

He felt tempted to try anyway. But Almasy wasn't his target, and there had already been one failure. A second failure would not be tolerated.

Instead, the man lingered, waiting until Almasy completely disappeared from his line of sight.

Then, whisking lightly through night's concealing cloak, he edged from his hiding place and darted toward the motel.

Chlorinated city water filled cupped hands, bursting upward to shatter like fragmented glass over her face.

In the mirror's grungy reflection, Quistis studied herself through dampened lashes.

Hollow darkness resided beneath those lashes, twin smudges of evidence hinting at her lack of sleep, the wan quality of her skin another indicator of stress. Whether that stress stemmed from her current status of wanted fugitive or Seifer's constant presence, she didn't really know. Most likely a combination of both; he was a trying student, and an even more exasperating partner in crime, so to speak.

She sighed, reached for the towel hanging over the edge of the sink, took a good look at it, and decided better of it. No reason to catch some sort of flesh-rotting disease.

She stared at her tired reflection for a long minute before shutting off the light and dragging herself back into the bedroom. Everything seemed to consume so much more engery this past week, even the simplest of movements. Perhaps that was due to the weight sitting on her shoulders, the knowledge that, bluntly speaking, she and Seifer were fucked. Well, she could probably talk Garden around her clash with the Timber officers, but the murders of those three young men and woman would not be so easily forgiven, especially given Seifer's track record. She knew he hadn't killed them, but no one else would believe that; even her word against the suspicions of a frightened public simply wouldn't hold up.

Which meant that, if they returned to Garden, he really would be executed this time, and nothing she said could stop that.

The thought started a gnawing little pain in her stomach, acid against the lining of her gut.

Of all the crimes he _had _committed under the sorceress' control, how ironic to finally be punished for something he hadn't actually done.

She pictured him handcuffed, on his knees before a firing squad, and suppressed a shudder. Their bullets would tear through the fine gold of that hair, rip apart the jagged outline of his scar, end forever the arrogant glow of those eyes and still the sneering mouth.

Quistis distractedly ran a finger along Save the Queen, clipped to her waistband as usual, virtually untouched since she'd used it to take down those officers back in Timber. She felt dirty, tainted somehow touching it now, an odd sensation when the silky cool graze of that leather used to provide her with a sense of comfort and satisfaction.

A noise outside the room alerted her.

She listened hard for a moment, trying to pick it up again, and heard the near-silent whisper of footsteps across the ancient floorboards that comprised the hallway past the closed door.

Someone trying to move quietly.

In a place like this, no one really worried about being courteous to their neighbors or took into consideration the fact that people might be trying to sleep in the middle of the night. They stumbled into the motel stinking drunk at all hours of the night and early morning or had drunken sex with hookers right out in the middle of the hallway. The fact that someone moved so stealthily outside her door so late automatically threw Quistis into soldier mode.

She tiptoed past the bed toward the door, and positioned herself off to one side of it.

The knob turned quietly, and she loosened Save the Queen.

In cheap action movies the hero or heroine never broke a sweat no matter how dangerous a situation they discovered themselves in, always ready with a snappy little one-liner for the bad guy right before they dispatched neatly of him. It was a wonderful lie, she thought idly, a great little falsehood for ordinary people to eat up. It turned heroes into gods, soldiers into undefeatable machines.

Real life was far less favorable. The good guys died in the reek of their own blood and bowels, fear twisted into a living thing inside the gut, and the clever lines dissolved into silent horror while a traumatized youth stood with someone else's blood thick on their hands.

Her heart thundered in the side of her neck, the jumping pulse beating itself against her flesh like a furious animal hurling itself into the side of a cage. The slightly salty tang of her own sweat curled in through her nostrils. This was the true soundtrack of a soldier's life; the drumming of a nervous heartbeat, anticipating and yet dreading action, packaged in the smell of perspiration and bile.

The door creaked open, offering no light; the single naked bulb in the hallway had probably burned out years ago.

A dark figure glided in on darkness and motes of dust.

She swung her elbow hard at the side of his neck; she moved fast, faster than most people could have anticipated, and yet somehow he dodged lithely, caught her by the arm, and slammed her face first into the wall with its dusty cracks and peeling wallpaper. The ominous _click _of a blade springing to life resounded loudly in her ears; Quistis tasted panic and kicked back with her foot, smashing into something solid but yielding. It bucked away from her, and she heard a muffled curse.

She pivoted, whipping Save the Queen from her belt and snapping it out toward him, its tip whistling mere inches past one of his eyes.

He thrust up a thick forearm, her weapon spiraling around it and cinching tight, then yanked hard, heaving her toward him. She crashed into his broad chest and wrapped her hand around a fistful of hair, coming away with a clump of sandy-blonde tufts clinging to her fingers. His free arm circled her waist, and she found herself suddenly airborne, hurtling through blackness and musty air to smash into the far wall, the pain of impact crushing every ounce of breath from her lungs.

She slid down mildewed wallpaper into a graceless heap, the gape of her lips sucking air noisily, a keening whistle in the room's otherwise stagnant quiet.

Her assailant uncoiled Save the Queen from his arm, tossed it down in disgust, and advanced.

Two minutes into his walk, he turned back, scowling at every pocket of shadow he encountered, as though he expected something nasty to pop out of it at any moment. Considering his surroundings, such an occurrence would have hardly shocked him.

He swept past reeking alleyways, his coat snapping briskly at both heels, a tattered second shadow that writhed in rhythm with the original, flaring up occasionally as he passed beneath dim street lamps. Restlessness caught him up in eager arms, the urge to keep walking forever, stalking the real shadows while he shut away the ones in his mind coiling through his body. But cold seeped its way through his battered overcoat, and the stench of urine and death leaking from seemingly every street corner crept into his nose to hibernate there. Frankly, he preferred the warmth of Trepe's body lying next to his, even if he couldn't stand her half the time.

His rapid stride carried him easily back to the motel; he slipped inside and jogged up creaking stairs toward their room, a sudden crash echoing from ahead stopping him dead in his tracks.

From here, he could see the door to their room, ajar, the sight of that open door pushing his heart with astonishing swiftness into his throat. _Shit. _Quistis wouldn't have left it open like that, if for no other reason than to prevent drunken passerbys from leering at her.

He took off running, snatching Hyperion free, veering in through the open door in time to catch some hulking brute leaning over Quistis sprawled out on the floor, a knife to her jugular.

The man twirled, cocked an arm--and Seifer instinctively ducked, tucking in a neat somersault that brought him right to the foot of the bed as the knife sailed harmlessly over him.

He chopped his gun blade brutally toward the man's legs. Quistis' attacker jumped deftly over the shining sweep of Hyperion and lashed a foot at Seifer's hand, smashing his fingers painfully, opening them with a jerk and depositing the gun blade on the floor.

Enraged, Seifer hurled himself headfirst at the asshole, planting his skull firmly in the man's stomach and shoving powerfully off his legs.

The muscular back slammed into the room's small window, splintering glass.

Quistis rolled out from beneath them, diving across rumpled bedcovers toward Save the Queen, flipping back to her feet with the whip dangling from her hand as the man smashed a huge fist into Seifer's jaw, lifting the slighter young man clear off his feet and staggering him backward onto the bed.

Seifer snarled, eyes wild, and kicked out with a foot as the man fell on him.

"Fira!" Quistis yelled, the small globe of flames condensing hastily in her palm, sailing in a bright ark toward the man's arm as he raised his fist for another hit. The spell grazed his right shoulder and he cried out, stumbling away, pain and anger swirling together in luminous green eyes.

For a moment she was startled by the familiarity of those eyes, so similar in shade to Seifer's. She'd never seen an emerald quite that clear replicated before, and sudden hesitation stalled her mouth around another spell. Then training took over once more and she hurled a ball of ice at him, following it up with a sharp flick of Save the Queen, opening a thin line of red just beneath his left eye.

Seifer hurled himself over the side of the bed and grabbed for Hyperion, turning the move into one smooth motion that ended with him steady on both feet, weapon aimed squarely at the man's bulky chest.

His eyes flickered a moment, then, so quickly even Quistis blinked in surprise, he spun, and crashed headfirst through the window, a bullet of Hyperion's chasing him out into the cold night.

Seifer dashed to the now empty frame, aiming again as the man picked himself up amidst glittering shards of glass. He fired, arm jerking with the recoil, and watched the man spasm briefly at the impact, then break into a sprint as though he'd merely been tagged by a large insect.

"You gotta' be fucking kidding me." Seifer growled, snapping Hyperion back into place.

Then, to Quistis' dismay, he jumped up onto the sill, a light breeze lifting the ends of his coat and fluttering it against her cheeks, its motion against her face just a memory as a moment later he too leapt out into the black sky.

Seifer hit the ground running.

The man ahead of him faltered slightly; he'd grazed him in the leg with his first shot, he felt pretty sure, and that at least should slow him enough to allow Seifer to catch up before he fled too far ahead.

Anger spurred him on, adrenaline a throbbing burn in his chest, a metallic aftertaste on his lips. Maybe he didn't even need the advantage of an injury; despite the fact that his foot burst into dull pain with every pounding step, a nice little memory of the explosion in Timber, he was gaining, pushing himself harder and harder with each inch of distance that narrowed between them. He hung on to the image of the man bending over Trepe, his weapon to her throat, one coarse hand reaching down as though to twine in her hair, pictured him thrusting that blade into soft white flesh, pictured him straddling her, tugging roughly at the waistband of her pants…

He sprang as the man barreled into an alley, spilling them both into a puddle of something Seifer hoped to Hyne was only water.

"Seifer!"

Her voice pierced the roaring in his ears as he rolled the man onto his back and hammered a fist into the man's clenched jaw.

"Seifer, stop! Don't kill him!"

Don't kill him? The fuck did she expect him to do? Put flowers in his hair, hold hands and instigate a duet of kum-by-yah? _Fuck that. _

He smashed his knuckles into the man's nose; hot blood spurted him in the face, trailing anger-clenched features to his lips. He fisted one hand more tightly in the man's collar and bashed him again, flicking his tongue roughly over red droplets.

"Seifer!"

His arm lifted, hurtled downward, lifted again.

Something whistled through the air, and he felt the sharp bite of Save the Queen, gashing him shallowly as it snaked around his wrist and yanked his hand off-center. He spat a curse as the man beneath him took immediate advantage and bucked him off, careening Seifer off a defiled brick wall and knocking the wind from him.

He saw one hand dart into the black jacket sheathing the man's athletic frame and wheezed a warning to Quistis as best he could. "Trepe!"

She was moving already, letting fly with her whip once more, sending the gun spinning off into the darkness before it had even completely cleared its holster.

The man ducked under her next attack and threw himself to both knees, skidding across the rubbish-strewn alleyway right next to Seifer, cold steel pressed to the blonde's temple before either he or Quistis could react.

"Put it down, or I blow his goddamn head off."

She froze instantly, with arm half cocked back mid-strike, studying the man for a moment with that calm, assessing look of hers before Save the Queen thudded quietly to dirty pavement.

"The hell are you doing, Trepe?" he snapped, ignoring the menacing look beamed at him from brilliant green eyes. The firearm's barrel dug a little deeper into his skull.

"She's saving you, at her expense." the man replied coldly, and swung the gun toward her.

Seifer reacted instinctively, flipping onto his side and jamming his knee in toward the man's gut as gunfire boomed loudly in the cramped alley. He heard a cry of pain but couldn't distinguish who uttered it; the night sky swirled dizzily around him, wisps of white sneaking in along his line of vision.

_"-Watch the blood circle the street's storm drains, taste it in your mouth-"_

_-Her nails in his skin, hot and shredding, her breath against his throat, feather light and searing-_

_-Her body draped over him, around him, while the screams of the dead echoed in his ears and their eyes peered out from her pale, calculating gaze-_

He shook with the force of the memory, with the grating reverberation of desperate shrieks that burrowed hot and sharp beneath his skin.

His eyes caught the flash of movement, and, acting on instinct again, his body responding even as his mind lost itself in the past, Seifer swung again, with the knife edge of his hand this time, connecting at the knee and dropping the man as he extended the gun once more.

The weapon clattered between them.

Seifer dove for it, knocking the heavier man aside. He saw himself clearly now, as though a part of him had peeled away from the main shell of his body to hover above, watching emotionlessly while his fingers closed securely around the handle of the firearm and slid it not toward the stranger dressed in black, but into his own mouth. He tasted the oily sleekness of gun metal, smelled the pungent reek of gun powder thick in his nostrils.

In the distance, he heard her laughing again.

"Seifer, no!" Quistis screamed, real terror in her voice, the first time he'd ever heard such an emotion puncture the icy calm of her tone.

His finger had taken on a will of its own. It caressed the trigger almost fondly, like a man's hands tracing idle patterns across his lover's back. A part of him recoiled at the thought of his death; like so many other young men, Seifer supposed he'd once thought himself immortal, able to withstand a thousand blows and still rise and continue fighting. But another, darker part, the piece of him that smelled of _her _and spoke with her voice, laughed at the irony of finishing what they'd failed at.

Solid warmth rammed him; his finger jerked, away from the trigger, and he and Quistis spilled in a tangle of limbs to the ground, her heart beating hard and fast against the side of his face where her chest came to rest.

He lay with his eyes squeezed tightly shut for a moment, waiting for the echoes of her laughter to recede, his pulse hammering just as wildly as her own.

He tasted blood. _"- Taste it in your mouth-"_

When he could finally open his eyes once more, the man had disappeared into the black anonymity of night, taking her laughter with him.

* * *

Train

Glacen City

The lights of the city slid into the black pool of nighttime behind them, blinking out one by one, like snuffed fireflies, until at last only moonlight illuminated the crowded boxcar.

He'd fallen asleep between her and a crate of vegetables, looking boyishly vulnerable in the moon's brief splashes of silver. She'd spent the last fifteen minutes watching him fight against gravity's pull, obstinate even in slumber, the head sliding down, toward her shoulder, only to jerk back upright before bobbing gently to one side again.

After a moment more of struggle, she felt the tickling strands of his hair brush her neck, and stay there.

Cool night air whisked in through the open door, chasing a shiver down her spine.

She tilted her chin up, studying the stars above, sprinkled like diamonds set in the black silk of a jeweler's artfully arranged box. They looked so tangible, so bright and glittering that for a moment Quistis imagined she could reach up and simply pluck one free, scattering it across her palm in a dazzling prism of grayed purples and charcoal blacks as the night caught on each of its facets and snaked through the jewel's center.

The black sky reminded her for a moment of the gun's barrel, and she curled in on herself, for warmth or comfort even she couldn't be sure.

The sight of Seifer jamming that barrel between his lips while desperation and madness burned with a green fever light in his eyes would never leave her.

Her eyes flickered toward his mouth. Splattered in alternating shades of black and white, it looked so…normal. A sensuous mouth, designed for trailing kisses down a creamy shoulder, not swallowing bullets.

He didn't look much like a soldier, Quistis reflected. Take away the hardness of those eyes and suddenly he was merely a good-looking young man, one who took classes at a local university, perhaps, charming the entire female populace with his shining blonde hair and debonair little winks. With his eyes shut and a strand of fair hair fluttering across the raised edges of his scar, he looked completely different. A stranger wearing the traitor's shabby overcoat and trademark disfigurement.

Seifer released a little sigh, and shifted against her.

He was shivering in the wind, she realized, the ripped trench coat not really sufficient protection against the chill strands of air that raked across them both.

Hesitantly, Quistis looped an arm around his shoulders, and pulled him closer against her side. It smacked of inappropriateness, the too-friendly instructor taking advantage of one of her pupils. But then, she wasn't his teacher anymore. And no matter the similarities between them, or the familiar gestures that he'd hung on to even after the war, the little nuances that made him Seifer Almasy, this wasn't the same boy who'd propped his feet up on his desk and challenged her authority. This was a man with demons in his heart and bitterness wrapped in the frail package of his skin.

Neither was she the same woman, Quistis realized. Ulticimea touched them all, but only Seifer had been opened entirely to her, his insides scratched away to be replaced with her poison. That wasn't something one just bounced back from.

She kept her own demons locked securely inside her, never sharing that burden with anyone, and that drew at least a small parallel between them, if not a much larger one than she wanted to admit. She knew what it felt like to balk against the acid of memories chewing away at your soul and your sanity, and any unpleasant memories she retained probably seemed pitiful in comparison to his.

Unexpectedly, Quistis felt a welling of sympathy for him. He wouldn't like that; the last thing Seifer wanted was to be pitied, or even understood. She thought a part of him must enjoy being hated, a sort of punishment for all the wrongs he'd committed.

_But you never did hate him, did you? _a small voice whispered at the back of her mind.

She'd thought she did. Maybe, once, a minor piece of her really had. But now, looking back, she recalled that she'd mostly alternated between exasperation that such a brilliant student would waste his time shunning his work and defying her and admiration for his nimble mind and capabilities. She'd thought about him often, usually at night during her most contemplative hours, picturing his sneer and wondering whether he was really as awful as some people made him out to be, or merely misunderstood.

Quistis wondered now, as she had then, what had driven him to Garden originally. She knew nothing of his childhood before the orphange, and could only recall bits and pieces of their time together under the care of Matron. What made a child that hard? He'd always been cynical, from what she could remember. It had saddened Matron, Quistis remembered, who knew more about Seifer than anyone and had doted on him despite how difficult he often was. Obviously she saw something underneath the bully worth caring for.

She had seen something in him too. Quistis had thrown troublemakers out of her class before--but somehow, she'd never had the heart to get rid of Seifer, the most troublesome of them all. Maybe she'd sensed the delicate familial ties binding them together, even if she couldn't recognize them.

He stirred again.

In the moonlight slanting over his face, Quistis saw his features twitch, and wondered what he was dreaming about. She guessed his dreams usually swirled into the dizzying blackness of nightmares, as hers often did. But watching him now, she was surprised to see the faintest of smiles touch his lips, curling them endearingly, the expression captured like that as she lightly brushed hair off his forehead.

The train plunged into a tunnel, and darkness stole the sight from her.

But she held it close to her heart, a memory that burned itself across her retinas and kept her just that much warmer.


	8. Chapter 7

**A/N: **Ok, I've finally gotten my computer out to my new place, so expect updates more regularly. Sorry for the delay in getting out this last chapter; I usually write faster than that, but I haven't had regular access to this story for several weeks now. You don't know how happy I am to be back at my writing full-time! Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy this latest chapter. Also, if 'Ragnarok' isn't the name of the ship, I'm sorry; I only have internet access rarely right now, so I can't just get on and research something if a question pops up while I'm writing. And can anyone tell me what Cid's last name is? Does he even have an official last name, or can I just take creative license with that?

**Chapter Seven**

Train

Ruby Dragon Forest

Seifer awoke to the pink blush of early sunrise, the light slinking beneath his eyelashes like elongated rose petals.

He blinked aside the last haze of sleep, and straightened upright to find a dead asleep Quistis cradled in his arms.

_The hell?_

The flattering illumination of dawn stroked fingers of red and gold over her peaceful face, intermingling as a burnished ginger across the strands of her hair, draped like warm sunshine across his forearms. Her bag lay neatly in her lap, clasped there by a pale hand.

She looked impossibly innocent, with those eyes closed and the sun's tentative rays painting her cheeks in soft hues. The sight caused a surprising pang in his chest, maybe because innocence--mere illusion or not--had always proved an elusive concept to him. Like a butterfly, it darted just beyond reach, dangerously fragile and fleeting.

He leaned out into the wind, no longer cold but touched with the chill that lingers just before true daylight, careful of the tracks blurring past beneath. Wouldn't that just be fucking great; Seifer Almasy, greatest war criminal ever, survivor of a hundred battles, not to mention the wrath of countless citizens demanding his execution, smashed beneath the wheels of a train after leaning too far over the side. Just what a broken failure like himself needed engraved on his tombstone.

_Here Lies Seifer Almasy, This Century's Greatest Fuck-up. _he thought wryly.

In the distance, he could see the outline of a city, growing less vague as the locomotive clanked toward it. More of a town, really, which was all the better for them. This far from Timber and Balamb, they probably wouldn't be recognized, especially considering that the majority of these backwoods hicks didn't own televisions or radios, just a shotgun and small-town friendliness that seemed to evaporate in the face of strangers. Especially strangers who strode in wearing hostility as a second skin, their self-confident carriage and apparel all but hollering "Soldier!"

Seifer smelled pine, and the faint musk of animal, carried to him on a ribbon of breeze from the forest rushing by in front of him.

He waited until the train began to slow, applying its brakes a good couple of miles away from the town, then shook her awake. She blinked at him through indolent lashes, and before she could even fully rouse herself, Quistis found herself tumbling down a grassy embankment beside him, a familiar twinge of pain lancing through the shoulder injured a few weeks back by her would-be assasin.

She lost her glasses in the rough landing but managed to hang onto her bag, and set it aside now to pat her way across dewy grass in search of the eyewear.

"Here." He nudged something glinting helpfully beside his foot, a ray of sunlight winging off dirt-speckled lenses.

She felt odd, letting him see her with the glasses off, almost as though he'd stripped her down and stood leering at her in a pair of skimpy underwear. The glasses served as a sort of shield despite their translucent quality, lending her a scholarly, detached air that she could duck behind when people tried too closely to examine the brittle cracks holding her emotions together. With the glasses on, she was Quistis Trepe, patient SeeD instructor and quiet book worm, the Ice Queen with the slow, unassuming smile. Without them, she was something less, and yet somehow more at the same time. She wondered sometimes if the glasses, the whole Instructor Trepe persona, weren't perhaps suppressing an important piece of herself.

Carefully, self-consciously, she tucked them back into place.

Seifer was already ahead of her, stalking off through the underbrush, his trench coat flapping briskly at his heels like a wounded dove attempting flight. She brushed grass and dirt from her clothes and jogged off after him, twigs crackling beneath her boots.

"There's a town a few miles north of here."

_I hope to Hyne they actually have working shower facilities. _Their last residence boasted only leaky pipes and a rusted bath so encrusted with grime she'd been forced to make do with the sink and a dingy piece of soap.

Quisis hated filthiness almost as much as she hated spending an entire night grading papers, only to be greeted the next morning with an awful cup of coffee offered up by an infatuated Trepie. Why, out of the entire bulk of her rather massive fan club, didn't at least one of them know how to brew a decent cup of coffee?

"Careful, that's Malboro Weed." she warned her companion, launching into teacher mode and pointing out the plant he brushed past. "It has a nasty sting--it can actually paralyze you for up to a few hours at a time. It was named after the Malboro's Bad Breath attack."

He didn't seem impressed. "Fucking fascinating, Trepe."

She bristled slightly at the tone of his voice. She was stuck with the damn asshole--couldn't he at least put a small amount of effort into being pleasant? Or at least attempting it? Even false niceties would be a welcome change.

Seifer spun abruptly around, the coat flaring out, startling Quistis with the suddenness of the motion. His smirk was a beautiful thing in comparison to the awful, bitter sneer that sometimes twisted the sensual lips. She realized again how good-looking he was, and wondered briefly just how many women had fallen prey to the green fire spitting from that gaze.

"You drool in your sleep, _Instructor_." He put his usual emphasis on her title, as though it were something she ought to be slightly ashamed of.

She tilted her chin a fraction higher. "I don't think so."

The eyes danced beneath errant strands of blonde. It was a look he needed to wear more often, a relaxed, almost jovial expression that softened the fierce brow and loosened the stern lips into a natural smile. It was a look that set even her heart to fluttering a little faster.

He held out his left arm for examination, the lips curling just a fraction more into that lazy smirk that suggested a secret.

Quistis checked despite herself, and to her disamy spotted a crust on his sleeve that did indeed look embarrassingly like human saliva. She felt her cheeks flare; he threw back his head and laughed.

"What else do you do, Instructor? Forget to wash your tea cup right after you use it? Sleep on your bed sheets for a whole two days before washing them? Fart and blame it on Angelo?"

The ember of humiliation burned hotter, but she didn't feel angry at him. In fact, as the embarrassment receded a bit, she realized she'd enjoyed his laugh, even if it had been at her expense. It made him seem…less scorn and bile, more human. Humanity she could deal with; the darkness in his eyes she couldn't quite probe, nor did she think she should.

"Of course not." she replied crisply. "I wouldn't dare leave the tea in there long enough to finish it before washing the cup, and the sheets are left for a day and a half, obviously." She adopted an impossibly snooty tone, and tipped her nose up in the air.

She'd surprised him. She saw it out of the corner of one eye, a flash of confusion mingled with amusement scrawling itself over his handsome features. The glimmer in his eyes reminded her of a man confronted with something disturbing yet inevitably humorous, unsure whether to throw up or chuckle. She could guess his thought almost exactly, even applying his deep, rough voice to the phrase that slithered through her head. _The fuck? Trepe can make a joke?_

Unexpectedly, tension she hadn't even acknowledged unwound from her chest. Quistis slipped a hand over her mouth and laughed quietly. "The look on your face-"

She turned away after a moment to compose herself, and when she faced him once more, he was smiling at her.

Not mockingly or cruelly, just a cruve of the mouth that reminded her of friends sharing a joke understood only by the two of them.

_"Quisty! Big chicken Quistis, won't even eat a little bug!"_

_-His blonde head flashing tantalizing glimpses of his position to her through waving corn stalks-_

_-Sunlight off jade, glinting wickedly as he stood with foot poised before her carefully-crafted sandcastle-_

A warm glow suffused her chest. It cheered her to share this sense of camaraderie with the unlikeliest of people, even if she didn't understand precisely where it stemmed from.

Perhaps, the two of them harbored a lot of misconceptions about the other, Quistis thought as he moved off through slanting rays of sunlight, filtering down through trees almost as vibrant an emerald as his eyes.

She lifted her face to the sun as it crested distant mountains and burst into full flame, smiling as its light chased the cold from her limbs.

Ragnarok Hangar

Balamb Garden

"Ow! Dang it, Zell, get off my dang foot!"

"If you wouldn't wear those huge clodhoppers everywhere you go, they wouldn't be in-"

"This is my style! A man has to have his own 'flair.'"

"Sure, if his boyfriend is too busy to pick out his clothes for him."

"Shh! Irvy, be quiet!"

"Me! He started it, darlin.'"

"You were the one who-"

"Shhh!"

"All right, all right." The voice sounded as a sullen growl in cavernous surroundings.

Slipping into the huge, echoing hangar bay housing Ragnarok beside Irvine, Zell smothered his annoyance and fought down the urge to kick his friend in the ass. He might have done it, if the happy-go-lucky little nymph that was Selphie Tilmitt hadn't lingered so closely, but at this crucial point in time, he didn't feel like testing her patience. He'd seen her pissed before, and while the anger had been directed at Irvine, he'd still suffered a few nightmares from the whole experience. She was a sunny day gone horribly wrong when angered, a roiling cloud bank rolling swollen charcoal puffs across a perfect summer day. Besides, they had more important things to concern themselves with than some petty argument.

Such as stealing the Ragnarok.

He could feel sweat building beneath his gloves. Moisture tickled Zell's upper lip and sluggishly caressed each knot of his spine. His stomach lay in a hopeless jumble of knots, a child's jump rope snarled impossibly by impatient hands.

The idea had struck him favorably at first, when they originally came up with it, weaving impossible rescue scenarios into reasonable thought in the privacy of Selphie's dorm room. In fact, he distinctly remembered leaping into the air, punching his fist enthusiastically toward her ceiling once they'd cemented their plans. That exuberance died now, executed swiftly by the firing squad of his nerves. Chasing after Quistis and Almassy in a giant flying hunk of steel now seemed the stuff of fantasies, a nice little image to add to his collection of imaginary damsels in distress rescued by the suave and ridiculously good-looking Zell Dincht, but not really a feasible option.

The most glaring obstacle being the fact that they hadn't a clue where Quistis and the traitor had disappeared to.

Selphie circled the hulking ship in a quick pre-flight inspection, and he scurried up its lowered landing ramp behind his tall friend.

_Too late to back out now._

A part of him wanted to. But the larger part, the one that kept him awake at night tying his innards securely around one another as concern for his friend gnawed through the lining of his stomach, prompted Zell to strap himself resolutely into a seat toward the back of the cabin.

They could become fugitives for the theft of such an important piece of military equipment, he acknowledged.

But wouldn't it be worth it to save Quistis? Wouldn't she do the same for any of them, in a heart beat, without even a second thought?

And, almost as important as snatching her back from Seifer's vile clutches, was the chance for vengeance, the opportunity to ram a fist down that blonde bastard's throat.

"All set!" the petite young woman chirped behind him, flouncing past toward the pilot's seat. Her cheerful attire, an almost eye-searing combination of bright yellows, greens and blues that somehow worked on her, seemed at such odds with the gloomy weight hanging like a stone in the pit of his belly. He tried to focus on those vibrant shades, tried to draw some sort of positive vibe from the don't-worry-be-happy mentality that he felt sure must project itself from the perky threads onto the wearer.

Whatever mystical powers they might bestow on Selphie missed him however, and he concentrated instead on preparing his stomach for an erratic few hours of Selphie piloting.

Zell watched her tip Irvine's hat out of the way for a quick kiss, then she set to work busily punching buttons on the panel before her.

He spared himself a brief moment to feel happy at their closeness, only a minor spark of jealousy cleaving through the emotion, before clinging to both arm rests for dear life.

The hangar door swished aside, the firefly lights of nighttime Balamb laid out prettily before them.

* * *

Ragnarok

Esthar

The bone-deep weariness of the culmination of several sleepless nights slammed into heavy eyelids.

He forced his blurring vision into focus, and glared down onto the computer panel in front of him. It offered little, giving out a tinny beep now and again, scattered sporadically with a few blinking lights but bringing him no closer to his friend then he'd been two hours ago.

Frustrated, Irvine tipped back in the co-pilot's chair and put his boots up on sensitive equipment. That earned an instant reprimand from his girlfriend, and, scowling, he slid lower in his seat and drew his hat down over his burning eyes.

"Don't pout, Irvy."

"I ain't, darlin.' Just tired, and worried."

She threw him a solemn look. "Me too. I keep thinking she might be…" She didn't want to finish that thought, but they both knew what she meant anyway. It was a thought that opened a festering wound inside of Irvine, and he turned his face away from her to stare moodily out the window as the bruised hue of midnight slid into a less severe navy blue. Hyne knew he'd had the same thought often enough, and he knew Squall was convinced Quistis was a goner. He couldn't really blame the Commander for taking such a bleak outlook on the situation; after all, she'd disappeared with Seifer a week ago and disappearances involving Almasy never boded well.

Still, he couldn't just give up. Despite the others' hatred of Seifer and their absolute conviction that he'd done something horrible to their friend--if not killed her then at the very least kidnapped her--Irvine just couldn't quite believe Almasy would take out his demons on Quistis that way. He could only remember bits and pieces of his childhood and snatches of memory involving Seifer were few and far between, but what he did recall was a skinny little blonde with a penchant for pestering Quisty. He'd mocked her mercilessly, but there'd always been a protective aspect to their relationship as well; Irvine specifically remembered the hot-tempered Zell losing his temper at the blue-eyed little girl and punching her in the eye once, before he'd fully grasped the concept that hitting girls was unacceptable. Seifer, standing nearby taking apart one of Selphie's dolls, had hurled the dismantled toy right at Zell's head and tackled him, starting a brawl that ended in two bloody noses and a bawling Zell. He pictured the green-eyed blonde now, swiping ineffectually at empty air while Cid held them apart, as furious as he'd probably ever been. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, a desire to believe there was still a small part of that little boy alive and smiling impishly inside the bitter young man. But he just couldn't bring himself to imagine Seifer actually harming Quistis. He didn't know exactly what had gone down in Timber, but he prided himself on his instincts, and right now they chattered noisily at him, urging him not to take the situation at face value. Judging before one had all the facts usually didn't end well. It was a concept similar to shooting; taking your shot before judging wind direction and speed and the position of the target would only end in disaster.

He rubbed his eyes briskly as Esthar floated past beneath them, lit brilliantly, a sparkling wonderland presided over by the dragon-like machine. Sighing and scratching his head beneath the brim of his hat, Irvine set to work scanning through the computer once more, sifting tirelessly through news articles in the hopes of some small mention of their wayward friend, looking for any tiny detail that he might attribute to either Quistis or Seifer's handiwork. He found nothing, as he had for the past hour, but there really wasn't much else he could do for right now, and he hated to sit idle. They were due to set down in Timber in about a half hour, a trip that normally would have taken a few hours by train or automobile. Normally, with Selphie in the pilot's chair, it would have taken only forty-five minutes, but tonight she flew more calmly. He didn't know whether it was depression turning her movements more sluggish, or just a natural caution; she hadn't done much night flying.

_There's gonna' be a shitstorm when Squall finds out about this. _the young man thought ruefully. Going AWOL with an extremely valuable piece of machinery was a no-no under any military organization, but particularly one controlled by the stern Squall Leonhart. The shit would definitely hit the fan for this one, and not even Rinoa's pacifying smiles would pull their asses out of the fire.

He only hoped this breach of Garden's rules proved to be worth it.

* * *

East Side

Ruby Dragon Forest

Their trek proved to be far more than the estimated 'few miles,' and Seifer's earlier genial mood rapidly vanished. He grew more and more snappish as the noon sun burned high and hot, the intense rays sieved somewhat by the thick foliage all around them. And finally, as mid-afternoon flamed toward the subtle blush of approaching sunset, he admitted--to himself at least--that they'd managed to get themselves hopelessly fucking lost.

Pretty fucking pathetic, honestly. Two SeeDs--or one SeeD and one wannabe who'd never quite measured up--trained for years in survival skills, getting themselves turned around in the woods just a couple of miles from town like a couple of idiot children wandering too far from their parents.

How many more failures would he collect under his belt before his death?

That word--failure--burned a hole through him, flashing jagged pieces of memory through his brain, images of Edea's mad burning eyes warping into the disapproving stares of teachers denying him SeeD status once again. It was a build-up of poison one could only take so long, venom that thrashed in the gut and seared his throat until finally, with a snarl of pure rage and frustration, Seifer yanked Hyperion from his belt, whirled frantically, and began hacking at the branches of a nearby bush.

His face twisted brutally, the lips curling back over gleaming teeth, the eyes narrowed to deadly slits as he sythed roughly away, as though his very life depended on the mutilation of the brightly flowering plant.

It was the first time she'd ever felt genuinely afraid of him.

Quistis shrank back, her hand closing around Save the Queen without her even noticing it, eyes wide as she watched him flail away in blind anger. She could practically sense violence radiating from him, the kind of anger that blazed outward like a nuclear blast, taking anyone within its range with it.

"Seifer."

His movements slowed fractionally.

"Seifer!" She tried again, more forcefully this time, and, swallowing her apprehension, reached out and lightly touched one broad shoulder.

Hyperion slashed around in a deadly ark.

He wore a killer's eyes.

She cried out in alarm and staggered backward, knowing it was too little, too late, expecting to feel the chill bite of his gun blade through the tendons of her neck at any moment-

He stopped mid-swing, panting, staring down from his higher vantage point, something dark and pained and raw slinking through his eyes as he looked at her--_through _her, Quistis thought with a sudden chill. He'd just peeled back the layers that comprised Quistis Trepe, thrusting the same tendrils of darkness that wrapped his soul into her body.

She kneeled where she'd fallen in the dirt, very still and quiet, like one who has unexpectedly stumbled across a dangerous wild animal.

Seifer stared down at the weapon in his hand, something akin to disgust rippling across his handsome features. He stood like that for almost an entire minute, a figure carved from the darkest parts of pain and suffering, captured in stone by an artist's skilled chisling.

Then, with a sudden abruptness that startled her, he snapped his hand open, and Hyperion crashed to the ground at her feet.

Nervous, she remained where she was.

"We're lost." he said briskly, scowling at her.

It was his voice, his tone, but the eyes had belonged to someone else for a moment. Someone capable of a thousand sins, of inflicting the worst kind of torment on a child and laughing the entire time.

He'd worn those eyes during the Sorceress War. They'd danced in merriment while Squall writhed in agony, burned feverishly as he tossed Rinoa into the waiting arms of Adel, sparked power and madness as he charged at Quistis with Hyperion extended, blood lust painted in the fierce lines of his face.

Crouched behind the glittering line of his weapon, Quistis stared up at him with eyes he remembered from his childhood. She'd worn that look once before, that amalgamation of frank terror and cautious hope that tightened his chest even now. Only last time, the cautious hope had been aimed at him and not that unabashed horror.

_"We're gonna' get eaten, Seif!"_

_"Shh, Quisty!"_

_The words burned in his throat. He felt them snag along each crease of flesh, choking him like probing fingers, a vast weight settling in the pit of his gut. He felt dinner churning erratically around that weight, and suddenly wished he hadn't pushed Zell down in the sand and then eaten the ice cream cone he'd dropped. _

_Beside him, Quistis trembled like the tree leaves that danced softly around them. _

_He put his arm around her in a rare show of emotion and jerked her against his side while bright scales slinked past beneath. The dragon stalked its way slowly along the forest floor, scenting prey but not yet locating it, tail twitching in broad, eager strokes as it anticipated a fresh kill. _

_Evening closed like a noose around them; the change in temperature pebbled his thin arms with goosebumps, and next to him Quistis shook harder. _

_"Don't worry, Quisty." he whispered in her ear, beyond teasing her for the moment. "I'll keep you safe." _

_And then those eyes, depthless blue and shining with unshed tears, turned on him, full of so much fear and longing that his own fright evaporated, just slightly. She believed him, clung to the tenuous hope that he, Seifer, would rescue her from the fatal mass of teeth and claws below, just like in the stories Matron told before bedtime where the brave knight swooped in at the last moment to save the princess…_

He was shaking as he snapped from his reverie. The emotions had reversed now, years later, the terror aimed at him and the tentative hope directed at herself, a wary belief that she could extract herself, alive, from the perilous situation. And in that moment, while he stared into her unblinking eyes, he wanted to say "Remember when we sat in that tree all night waiting for the dragon to leave, and I protected you, just like I said I would?" He wanted to remind her of that small sliver of compassion, help her to remember that once he'd been nothing but knobby elbows and skinned knees and full of the expectations only the naivety of childhood can produce.

"Don't look at me like that!" Seifer snapped, spinning away, holding himself so tensely he thought he might snap in half. He didn't know why she had this power over him, why he suddenly wanted to fold onto his knees and beg forgiveness for every wrongdoing he'd ever committed, while the sun limned her from behind like heaven's glow caressing an angel's delicate outline.

Wordlessly, Quistis picked herself up and tidily dusted herself off, hesitating for a moment before retrieving Hyperion and handing it to him.

He felt like sobbing as his hand closed numbly around the handle. He was broken beyond repair, just like the toys he'd loved smashing up as a child. And here she was, as she had then, picking up the scattered pieces, but without tears or angry tirades this time, just a tired silence that hardened to disappointment in the blue eyes. He preferred her crying, or her screaming; there was too much left unsaid in that silence.

"It's going to get dark soon." Quistis pointed out coolly. "We should build a camp for tonight, before some of the nastier monsters start appearing."

"Fine." he replied shortly, reattaching Hyperion.

They split up without another word, Seifer heading off into the forest to seek out stray pieces of wood to use for a campfire, Quistis clearing out a small area to use as a fire pit. Her heart hadn't yet recovered from the edgy moment, and she used the minutes of his absence to calm herself down.

She felt bitterly disappointed, and was disgusted with herself for the emotion. She didn't know what she'd expected from Seifer, but after the week they'd spent together, coming to understand one another a little better and particularly that moment of rare amity earlier that morning, she thought they'd perhaps…started something. A brief spark of friendship, something fragile that he'd just destroyed.

_But it's Seifer. _Quistis argued with herself. Friendship with him was like trying to strike up an acquaintance with a blue dragon, or attempting to remove a hot dog from Zell's hand mid-bite; dangerous and pointless.

Still, it hurt to think she still couldn't reach beyond the barriers of her former student.

By the time he returned, she had settled herself on a large boulder with a notebook spread across her lap, the setting sun turning her hair into a fiery halo around her pale face. He didn't look at her as he hauled an armload of firewood into the little ring she'd created, swearing under his breath as he caught one of his nails on a piece of bark and tore it down to the skin. She'd set out a box of matches and everything, as well as several fire starters composed of dried monster feces and shaggy moss, an essential in any survival kit.

Trust Trepe of all people to keep stuff like that in her fucking purse.

Though warm now, the dying sun raising sweat on his brow and beneath his coat, which he eventually shed, setting aside on a nearby log, Seifer knew it would cool off immensely during the night. Not as cold as Balamb's nights perhaps, but still enough to prompt him to start a rousing blaze, the flames crackling high into the darkening sky.

He thought of making a comment about the necessity of huddling for warmth during the night--preferably naked. The taunt sat just on the edge of his tongue, but he was too weary, too dissatisfied with himself and the whole fucking situation to actually voice it. And besides that, he really didn't want Save the Queen shoved down his throat.

Seifer turned his back on her and sat facing the fire, listening to her scribbling away, the consistent scratch of her pencil an odd intrusion in the normal woodland sounds. He imagined her hunched slightly over the paper in thought, eyes like focused lasers behind the prudish glasses, the barest smile of satisfaction curling her mouth at the corners. It was a pose she'd adopted often behind her desk, one he'd watched while he was supposed to be taking the latest of her three hundred million exams. They'd mostly been on the rules of engagement and junctioning guardian forces, topics that held no interest for him. He made up his own rules as he went along, and he hated using GF's; they were a crutch, for weaker soldiers who couldn't win with physical prowess alone. He found it much more interesting to study Trepe, seeking out her weaknesses, which he could then, and did, exploit for his own entertainment.

She humored him far more than any of his other instructors had. Sure, she'd lost her temper a few times, shot him some dirty looks, even dropped her head into her hands in pure frustration during some of his worst moments. But through all that, Seifer realized, looking back, she'd never really given up on him. Maybe it was just her natural stubborness, but she'd clung to him far longer than any of his other teachers, determined to turn him into the talented and invaluable SeeD she knew he had the potential to be.

She'd been wrong, and stupid, Seifer thought bitterly. Her obstinacy blinded her to the most important fact of all, the one thing above all others that made him Seifer Almasy. He was not a team player; he flouted authority at every opportunity, and he always would, and a good little soldier simply didn't do that. They took orders and shut the hell up. Probably why Squall had risen so far in the ranks, while he remained lowly and worthless and hated.

Lost in his contemplations for a while, Seifer didn't notice the creeping chill until his ears picked up the telltale chattering of teeth. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw her hunched in on herself, still writing, although more slowly now as she hugged one arm around her knees, trying to preserve as much body heat as possible.

"Warmer over by the fire." he said brusquely.

"I'm fine." Quistis replied just as briskly.

He scared her. Once that would have pleased him, would have fanned the flames of his arrogance even higher. He could use that, back her into a corner, intimidate her, assert his dominance over her while she cowered before him and the power he so aspired for sang richly in his veins. Now he only felt a little sick to his stomach, and suddenly, bone-numbingly tired. He was fucking sick of fighting. He'd been doing it his whole life, and yet for the few seconds he sat looking at her, Seifer suddenly tired of it all, as though she'd sucked the violence and the anger right out of him, leaving behind a hollow ache.

She didn't understand. She never would; no one could really comprehend just how badly Ulticimea had hurt him. She'd taken his boldness, his pride, and turned them on himself, and the world, until he was more than just a domineering bully, a cold-hearted monster who reveled in the death of innocents. She'd twisted something vital inside him, tainting it, scorching away the part of him that once beat up three students ranks ahead of himself who'd cornered a scared underclassman and begun groping her. She'd stolen the small piece of goodness from him that he hadn't even noticed until it was gone.

But Quistis, with her inflexible discipline, could never understand that. And she particularly couldn't understand how much the sorceress was still a part of him, over a year after the end of the war. If she knew, she'd never have fought so hard for his release. She'd have watched him hang, like all the others, triumph and a sense of justice well served bright in her eyes.

Eventually, the cold overpowered even her wariness of him, and she crossed over to the fire, seating herself across from him, her eyes downcast as she closed her notebook and set her pencil aside with deliberate movements.

His brooding profile flickered eerily, flames reflected in the pensive green irises.

"We're going to be stuck with one another for Hyne knows how long." Quistis began slowly, meeting his gaze head on. "I want to help you Seifer; I know you didn't kill those children, and I don't want to see you punished for something you didn't do."

He snorted and flashed her a tight-lipped, wry smile without an ounce of humor in it. "It'll make up for not getting punished for all the things I _did _do."

"I want to know a couple of things." she went on as though he hadn't spoken, regarding him coldly, her eyes glacial. "Are you still…under her control? I don't mean actively, but is there still a part of you that can't let go?"

He opened his mouth to say 'no' after her first question, but the one that followed it up snapped his mouth shut once more, and he sat with his hands clenched in a tight knot between his knees, staring hard at the scarred knuckles. He knew instinctively he couldn't lie; she'd sense it immediately. But he'd held so much inside him for so long, actually confessing about the nightmares, the splinters of memory that lodged themselves against his brain stem and tormented him endlessly seemed…unnatural.

So instead he said nothing, while she studied him with that dissecting look of hers, the same one she'd used on students who'd forgotten to turn their homework in.

He would know. He'd been on the receiving end of it numerous times.

"Seifer." she prompted after a long moment of silence.

"That's not really any of your fucking business, is it?"

"I consider it my business. I want to know that I'm traveling with just Seifer Almasy and not the echoes of a psychotic sorceress attempting to take over the world."

_How the fuck did she know? _It was like she could see right inside of him, her eyes dragging every last dirty, wretched part of him to the surface.

"Piss off, Trepe." he snarled.

"No, Seifer, I will not piss off. I'm not going to let you bully me the same way you did to everyone else in Garden. I want an honest answer, and I'd rather not have to use force to get it out of you."

How could he? Seifer wondered, glaring helplessly at her in frustrated rage. How could he tell her that he suffered from nightmares so dark and horrible he sometimes wanted to kill himself just to make them stop? How could he say "Yes, Quistis, sometimes I think she never really left at all, because I can still hear her laughing at me, goading me on, reminding me every time I shut my eyes of my worst failure of all?" He couldn't open himself to her--to anyone--like that. But most of all to her, she who'd always believed unfailingly in him even when it was clear to everyone else that Seifer Almasy was simply a lost cause. Fucking Hyne, he just _couldn't_.

The hardness gradually fled from her eyes, replaced by an infinite sadness.

Sighing, Quistis hesitated a moment longer, then stood up and walked around the fire to stop in front of him. "Seifer." She said his name in a voice he'd heard her use once on a student lying badly injured in the Training Center, panicked because they sensed their death approaching. She'd sat with him for hours, long after Dr. Kadowaki quietly admitted there was nothing else she could do for him, talking gently to him about his mother and his sister, holding his hand so he wasn't alone in his last hours.

He died with a smile on his face.

Seifer remembered the expression clearly, tinged with resignation but also a sort of gladness, as though he'd witnessed something precious in his last few moments.

"Seifer."

He turned his face away. He wasn't some inexperienced, innocent little cadet simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, submerged in combat before he was ready, crying bitterly for the warm comfort of his mother. He didn't need her to act as his fucking savior.

She touched him lightly beneath the chin with her fingertips, and that soft little contact suddenly melted the resentful knot coiled in his stomach.

Hyne. How long had it been since someone had touched him like that? Without harshness, an unvoiced death threat burning madly in angry eyes, just her gaze, open and warm now in the light of the fire, and the barest graze of her skin across his. No one had touched him like that, gently, since…fuck. Since he was a child, skinning his knees and clumsily bruising himself in Matron's orphanage.

Seifer ducked his cheek into the palm of her hand almost against his own will. He raised a hand, lit from within like a coal by the fire's presence, and slipped it over her own, crushing her fingers closer to his skin in an almost painful grip.

Then he closed his eyes. Sitting there, he simply existed, without thought or regret, breathing in the scent of her skin, listening to the crackle of flames and the hushsed whisper of animals moving through the brush while she stood stiffly, unsure how to react to his obvious need for reassurance.

It was so uncharacteristic, so decidedly un-Seifer like that Quistis momentarily froze, simply staring down at the bowed head. Streamers of red-orange illumination crawled through the strands of his hair, changing flaxen to a cherry gold so brilliant it almost pained her to look at it.

He blinked unsteadily up at her after a long moment, as though awakening from a trance.

She didn't know what to say to him. Her earlier speech, prepared while she labored over her notebook, had flown from her head the moment she saw those eyes glaze over in a pain so acute it hurt her just to observe it, and she couldn't recall even a single line of it now. The pain was still there, bright and shining and helpless, all the things he was not; the look belonged on another man, not the arrogant youth sitting before her.

His conceit drove her crazy in the classroom; it might have been just a touch of jealousy, that he could wear self-assurance so easily while she struggled daily with her own doubts and misgivings, but Quistis had loathed Seifer's large ego even more than his complete disregard and blatant abuse of authority while he was under her tutelage. It made him a loose cannon, the fierce independence turning him into something far more than a simple, mindless automaton programmed to follow orders above all else. It made him a leader, but one that antagonized his troops more often than he gained their respect, because of his unshakable belief that he could do no wrong. Seifer followed Seifer's rules, so consequently he didn't consider himself to be straying from anything.

But even the petty bully with his insufferable ego was better than this, this…shattered soul.

Had it been solely Ulticimea that sharpened the torment in his gaze to so wicked a point, or was it something more, something even before that?

He seemed to suddenly realize that she'd seen too much, and wrenched his face away from her hand. "Mind your own damn business, Trepe." The demand in those words left no room for argument, his face completely closed off now.

She did this time, falling asleep alone, and cold, despite the roaring fire.

* * *

Town Square

Timber

Irvine turned around to see Zell, a hot dog in each hand and one dangling from his mouth, bombing toward him at full speed. A scrawny little mongrel of a dog ran enthusiastically after him, and whether it was actually pursuing his friend or just hoping he'd drop some of his food during the mad dash, he couldn't be sure.

"Didn't you learn your lesson last week?" he asked the martial artist, straightening the shoulders of his duster and shooting his friend's lunch choice a pointed look. "I ain't carryin' your vomitin' butt to the hospital again."

"Nnngh ri yo buehedh!"

"Right." Irvine rolled his eyes and turned around to search for his girlfriend. She should be easy enough to spot, considering her clothing and the fact that the town wasn't exactly bustling, just a few people browsing among various vendors with baskets in hand. He spotted her long before Zell began to jump helpfully up and down, waving his arms in her general direction and almost dropping one of his hot dogs in the process. _So much for not attracting attention to ourselves. _Not that they'd really avoiding doing so, flying in on the Ragnarok like that and declaring themselves to be on an urgent mission for SeeD when questioned by a few unhappy law enforcement officers. Still, Zell was drawing the stares of every single person within a fifty foot radius, flailing around like that.

"Cool it, man." Irvine advised him, lifting a hand to acknowledge Selphie's frantic wave.

"Irvy! Irvy, come here!"

"Ooo tink shesh wanna homt dooyl?"

"Dincht, I can't understand what in the hell you're sayin.'"

Zell crammed the rest of his lunch noisily into his mouth, chewing loudly for a moment, then swallowing the entire mess with an audible gulp. "I said, 'Do you think she'd want a hot dog?'"

"Oh sure." Irvine called back over his shoulder, ambling casually toward her, tipping his hat to a few young women who scattered bashfully across his path. They giggled and blushed, then flounced onward. "She really enjoyed washin' your hot dog vomit outta' her hair. I'm sure she's jest chompin' at the bit to have a little snack that reminds her of your puke."

"How do you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Irvy! Hurry up!"

"I'm comin,' darlin'!"

"Have women falling all over themselves every time you smile at them."

"It helps that I don't have hot dog stuck in my teeth."

"Huh?" Zell probed around his mouth with his tongue.

"You're carryin' enough around in your fangs to feed all of Esthar for an entire month, Dincht."

"Oh. Thanks." He slipped one of his extra hot dogs into a pocket and shoved the whole length of the remaining one into his mouth. Irvine grimaced. His friend's eating habits really disturbed him sometimes. The worst part was, he'd eat the hot dog he'd just stored in his pocket, after Hyne only knew what else had been in there. He'd witnessed him eat from much worse conditions.

A dumpster, for instance. That had been an interesting little situation, actually. They'd dragged Squall along for a good old-fashioned Guy's Night Out and hit up a few bars in downtown Balamb with Zell, a lightweight anyway, getting himself slobbering drunk after consuming enough alcohol to bring down a T-Rexaur in full-on rage mode. He'd pried himself out of their steadying grasps and shot off down an alley they'd just passed, babbling something about a hot dog. They'd turned around to retrieve him, only to find Zell ass-up in a dumpster pawing frantically through it, swearing to Hyne he'd seen a hot dog, and Hyne _dammit_, he was going to find it. The hot dog turned out to be the ratty tail of an unfortunate alley cat, which he actually began to chew on before Squall, annoyed that they'd taken him away from his work for _this _and not at all amused, knocked him out cold with a well-aimed punch to the jaw.

Irvine reached Selphie, who stood--well, pranced more like it, the energetic young woman hardly ever opting to stand still--in front of a produce stall presided over by a frail old woman with her long gray hair pulled tight in a grandmotherly bun. He flashed her his trademark lady killer smile and actually swept his hat off this time, giving a little bow. "Afternoon, ma'am."

Behind him, he heard the mutt let out a sharp bark, a yelp from Zell following a moment later. Then, with another cry, his friend staggered past him and bowled right into the wooden stand, flinging tomatoes and heads of lettuce in all directions. The dog landed squarely on top of him, his grubby paws resting on Zell's chest, the undernourished snout pushing its way into his pocket and then jerking back out the moment he discovered the hot dog.

His tail wagged thankfully, then, with what seemed to Irvine a giant toothy grin, he dashed off while Zell darted unsuccessfully to his feet, getting tangled up in himself and crashing sideways into the stand once more, just barely missing Selphie. "Hey! Hey! He stole my hot dog! _He stole my hot dog_!"

The old woman produced an umbrella from behind her counter and rapped him smartly on the skull with it. "There, young man, you stop your whining. You're disturbing my peace and quiet."

"Sorry, ma'am. He didn't mean nothin' by it. Let me pay for the damage."

"But he stole my hot dog." Zell grumbled. "Dirty, thieving little shi-"

Irvine jabbed his friend with an elbow. People tended to be wary enough of SeeD's without them adding to it by blurting out expletives in front of a nice little old lady.

"Oh, he's a rascal. Fucking bandit trampled right through my flower bed the other night, would you believe it? Yes, the little shit just ran his big clumsy paws through my beautiful little geraniums that took me a damn year to perfect." She indicated Irvine with a jerk of her chin, seemingly oblivious of their shocked stares. "Nice young man, by the way. Yours?" she asked Selphie.

"Yep!" the girl admitted cheerily, recovering quickly. "He's all mine!" She tucked her arm through one of Irvine's. "Anyway, Rosemary, tell Irvy and Zell what you were just saying to me."

It didn't surprise Irvine that she was already on a first name basis with the old woman; she just had a way with people. They regarded her as cute and child-like, a mistake many of her enemies made, to their own detriment.

"Oh, yes. Anyway, Selphie here was asking me a few questions about that awful racket that went down here about a week ago. Just terrible. Two young men and a woman killed and several fine law enforcement officers attacked…" She tsked and shook her head. "I actually saw it. I was sitting right here, trying to sell my vegetables, when all of a sudden a few of those awful soldiers decided to pick a fight with a man waiting for the next train. They were loud and obnoxious like a lot of them are--he was just minding his own business and they got right up in his face. Obviously just wanted to start something. There was a bit of taunting going on, nothing too dangerous to start off, and then all of a sudden one of them throws a puch at the young man. Handsome thing, actually. If I were just a few years younger, I'd have left Mellie over there to watch my veggies and seen if I couldn't persuade him to stay just a little bit longer."

"What did he look like, ma'am?" Irvine intervened politely.

"Oh, tall, quite tall actually, I'd say around your height, young man, and nicely-built. Not like some of these skinny young things you see around here a lot these days. Actually had some muscle on him. Blonde hair, fairly short but not almost bald, you know what I mean? Don't like that look myself. Never appealed to me. My first husband had beautiful hair, down to his shoulders, the darkest black you've ever seen and so shiny you could see your reflection in it. Good hair doesn't make up for being a bastard, though, so I drove him off. Beat him every day with whatever kitchen appliance I happened to have in my hand until he finally decided he couldn't take it anymore and left me. And thank Hyne, not a moment too soon. What was I saying?"

"You were describing the man you saw, the one the soldiers picked a fight with." Zell prompted, still looking a bit miffed about his pilfered hot dog.

"Oh yes. You'll have to excuse me, I'm sorry. Memory not what it used to be. I'm not all that young anymore, you know." she confided to them in a conspiratorial whisper.

"Don't you be lyin' to us." Irvine scolded her. "You ain't a day over thirty, ma'am, and even more of a blossoming flower than your geraniums."

Zell turned a snort into a discreet cough.

"Aren't you sweet! Anyway, yes that man was indeed a fine male specimen. Tall, like I said, blonde hair with a couple of pieces falling down over his eyes. Nice color of green, too. He ran right past here when things got ugly, and I got a good look at him. Scar right between his eyebrows, too. Reminded me of something, but I couldn't quite think of it."

The three exchanged looks. That had been Seifer, without a doubt.

"Did you see what happened next?" Selphie asked.

"You bet I did! That young man ducked himself behind one of the buildings just as those soldiers opened fire on him. Most excitement I've had in years. Things got nasty when those poor children got in the middle of it, though."

"Children?" Irvine prompted.

"Those teenagers that were murdered." The old woman clucked her tongue sadly. "So senseless. Didn't have to happen, really, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I always hated soldiers, but after seeing what they did to those three…" She trailed off, her eyes taking on a faraway glint, sadness pulling the wrinkled skin tight.

That perked all three of them up. "You mean the blonde guy didn't do it?" Zell demanded loudly.

"Oh no! In fact, he'd gone into one of the other buildings, dragging another man with him. It was one of those men in uniform, sliced them up nice and neat while he thought no one was looking. No idea why he did it; frustrated perhaps, but that's no excuse for murdering innocents for Hyne's sake. Wish I'd seen him again after that. I'd teach him to value human life."

Irvine disentangled himself from Selphie and pressed both of his hands against the stand's counter, eyeing the woman earnestly. "We're pretty sure the man you saw was Seifer Almasy, ma'am. Name ring a bell?"

"Yes! Must be the soldier who killed those poor children, because all I've been hearing these past few days is about how Seifer Almasy murdered helpless little innocents and took out a few police officers before kidnapping a young woman and fleeing the scene."

_She obviously doesn't have a television or a radio, if she doesn't know who Seifer is. _Irvine thought dryly. "Seifer Almasy wasn't the soldier. He was the blonde, ma'am. You're saying it wasn't him who killed those kids?"

"Hyne, no! I saw the whole thing. No one pays any attention to us old ladies, you know. I just thought everyone was referring to that soldier. Didn't know they thought it was that handsome young thing who did the dirty deed. I'll swear before Hyne and my dead third husband it wasn't him, I can tell you that much."

It was more than Irvine had expected to learn, at least, and now he could relax slightly, knowing that Seifer wasn't responsible for the deaths and that Quistis was still, presumably, in his company. He glanced at his friend, the tattooed face clenched in unhappiness. Whether because he still bemoaned the loss of his hot dog or he felt ticked that he'd now lost his primary excuse for sticking sharp implements beneath Seifer's fingernails the moment he got ahold of him, Irvine didn't know. Whatever emotions Zell might experience at the moment, though, he at least felt a massive weight lifted from his shoulders, and even Selphie appeared perkier, if that were possible.

It did, however, complicate the situation. Someone had murdered harmless adolescents and then set about placing the blame on Almasy's shoulders, which meant, depending on who had committed the deed, they potentially had a political shitstorm on their hands.

Irvine calmly asked her to describe the soldiers' clothing, and when she sketched out a clear picture of the Galbadian uniform, he felt a sinking weight in his stomach.

Things were about to get ugly.

* * *

She packed up last, diligent about staying until every last one of her vegetables had been bought out. She enjoyed staying out into the last hours of dusk anyway, basking under the sun's long good-bye before night closed its fists around the town.

The old woman found herself contemplating her three young visitors from earlier that afternoon; unique enough when considered individually but downright interesting when grouped together. They seemed an odd trio, the one with his almost lazy charm, the others full of a boundless energy distinctly absent from his easygoing demeanor. The girl's sprightly glee mismatched the other young man's rapid temper and hyperactive little quirks, yet she sensed a closeness about all three of them that reminded the woman of her two long dead sisters.

Still thinking about them as she dusted her little stand and collected a few smashed tomatoes--she always sacrificed a few of them to clumsy elbows and feet--Rosemary remained oblivious as the shadow slipped from behind a nearby building, an oily cut-out against the fading crimson of the sky.

She felt the touch of steel at her throat a minute later.

Her blood fanned in a grisly arrangement that was almost beautiful across the back of her stall, an artist's abstract work flung haphazardly over battered wood. Creative genius, slithering in vivid banners down a wooden canvas, the same color as the bleeding sky.

* **

Quistis woke in time to watch the fire's last embers wink out of existence.

She didn't see Seifer anywhere, the frayed trench coat and glint of Hyperion a blatant absence in the forest's stillness. Maybe he'd grown tired of having his brain picked apart with amateur clumsiness by a wanna-be psychologist. It was laughable, really, that she would even presume to try and unravel the inner threads of his complicated psyche, when she herself buried her own issues so deep even she sometimes forgot they existed. _But if not me, then who?_ Everyone else either hated or feared him too much to even put in the effort, and she had yet to come across anyone as stubbornly persistent as she in regards to Seifer. Any sane person would have backed slowly away at the first hint of that look in his eyes, the one that chilled the blood and reminded the observer that Seifer Almasy had spent his formative years training in the art of killing.

Which, Quistis supposed, made her officially nuts.

She stretched out the kinks hibernating deep in her muscles from a night spent sleeping on the hard ground, and rose stiffly to her feet.

It was still early; she could tell by the pale flush of sunrise that trickled down through thick trees, pink ribbons that slanted across the gray ash of their campfire. The scent of trees and fresh air brought back snatches of childhood memories; playing hide-and-go-seek within the shelter of drooping branches, chasing Seifer through a clearing and skinning her knee in the process, climbing trees and consequently falling out of them.

She regretted she couldn't remember more, Quistis thought with a pang of sadness, wiping the gunk of sleep from her eyes with a dirty sleeve. She could picture Matron's gentle smile, but couldn't remember the reason for the curving of those pretty lips. She saw the sleek raven shine of her hair, but couldn't recall if she'd ever spent hours playing with the soft strands. The deficiency of those memories raked a fissure through the center of her soul, pieces of herself misunderstood, and hated, because she could not fathom where they'd originated.

"This place look familiar to you?"

His voice startled her; she jumped, and the sight of the Ice Queen jolting like a guilty child flickered Seifer's lips in that infuriating smirk for a moment. He stood several feet away from her, shadowed by the lattice of branches that forked over his head, Hyperion slung over a shoulder, his eyes burning with something that reminded her of the ugly emotions rotting in his gaze last night. It wasn't the same naked agony she'd seen then; Quistis knew that right away, but it was something he didn't wear often, and it took her a moment to place the look.

_He's…nervous? A little afraid of something. _

He blinked, and whatever she'd glimpsed, or thought she'd glimpsed, vanished.

"Well, we did just spend the night here." she replied, answering his question. "I don't think that pushing paperwork as an instructor has so dulled my reflexes that I can't recognize where I fell asleep the next morning."

"No, but I heard one of the side effects of having a stick up the ass is blurry vision."

Ah. Back to that, then. At least she knew how to deal with his banter and his endless sniping. Soothing his pain and confusion she was not so adept at.

She lifted an eyebrow wryly.

He jerked his chin at her, indicating for her to join him.

She did so, gathering up her bag and rustling her way through long grass, sliding a little on plants glistening with a filmy layer of morning dew. Like miniature diamonds, the shiny droplets caught the weak light as pink illumination brightened into a tangerine glow, reflecting it off her glasses.

Seifer swung around, his gun blade seeming to wink at her as the same illumination sparked across its length.

He led her out of the trees and into a large clearing, rocky terrain and the ocean now visible from where they were standing. She squinted into the rising sun, shading her eyes, and rocked back in sudden shock as the sun caught on a tall white spire and hovered there, as though hooked on the spindly rooftop.

The lighthouse. The Orphange.

They'd traveled to the other end of the continent during their journey, full circle back to where it had all really begun, with Ulticimea's possession of Edea.


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Matron's Orphanage

Galbadia

She opened the door to find her children standing before her, bold and proud and incredibly precious, just as she remembered them, and felt the acid sting of tears just behind her eyelashes.

The sun shone off two heads of an almost identical shade of blonde, flashes of gold that carried memories to her of those same heads years ago, playfully chased up the beach by an out-of-breath Cid while the salty wind whisked the sounds of their laughter to her ears.

Seifer, tall and strong as ever, looked fierce, Hyperion still slung guardedly over his shoulder, as though he didn't trust her or their situation long enough to sheath his weapon. And even as that hurt her, like a blow to the gut, Edea basked in the familiarity of that obstinate line across his brow, the same groove that furrowed itself above his eyebrows even as a child, before the scar that interrupted it now.

Quistis' face, far less harsh than his own, blossomed into a pleased smile. It was the radiance of that expression that warmed her even more than the sun, and despite Seifer's glare, she stepped forward to drape her arms around them both, a few silent tears trickling down her face as she buried wet cheeks in the wood-smoke-laced folds of his coat. It smelled of him, Edea thought, and the ghosts that lay between them.

They were ghosts he had yet to forget, and forgive her for, and knowing the stubborn aspects of his personality as she did, he probably never would.

That knowledge burned as a physical ache inside her, worse even than the agony that cramped her stomach while she watched strangers take her beloved children away, because in his eyes, she saw the echoes of a pain more savage than any she could even imagine. He hid it well, but she'd known where to search for it from the time he was seven years old, and now even as a man he couldn't conceal his inner demons from her. Naked, laid bare before her eyes, they squirmed in all their dark perversion, reminding her of the darkness that had once crawled inside her own skull.

She held them both a while longer even though he stiffly refused to respond to the embrace, and, dashing the tearstains from her cheeks as she pulled back, smiled gently up into his hostile face.

He very deliberately picked up her hand--she experienced a momentary flash of joy, fleeting and beautiful as she imagined him cradling the hand against his cheek, longing for his mother's touch fervent in his eyes--and flung it off his shoulder where it had slid to rest.

Her throat clenched around a sob.

Quistis felt the tremor of her body, and pressed a little closer, concern obvious in the bright blue gaze.

"I'm so glad to see you both." she whispered, and turned around to lead them into the house, without interrogation or accusations, just an almost painful sense of relief that throbbed like a second heart in her chest. The young woman tailed her willingly, wiping her feet carefully on the welcome mat just inside the door.

Seifer did not.

* * *

Freshly showered, and clad in an old dress of Matron's while she waited for her clothes to finish up in the washing machine, Quistis sat across from the woman she'd once considered her mother and now hardly knew, surrounded by the clutter of her own childhood, so real now she could reach out and touch it even if she barely recognized it.

She studied Matron for a long moment, lingering on the stray wisps of silver nestling among the raven banner that streamed down her back and framed the lovely face. Gray threads she knew hadn't existed the last time she'd seen her, standing in Cid's office with that same soft smile, her palms spread wide in welcome like pale flower petals. She never had been much for military protocol, even standing in the middle of one of the most prestigious military training centers in the world. Quistis liked that about her; the utilitarian walls and sense of military etiquette that seemed to ooze from the very building itself sucked the color out of many people. It had long since drained her of any infantile whims, aging Quistis too quickly, an ancient mind trapped in the youthful shell of her body.

Distantly, piercing the heavy scrutiny she leveled on both Matron and the orphanage around her, Quistis picked up on the whistle of a tea kettle. Matron excused herself and disappeared with a swish of dark hair and plain skirts, leaving Quistis alone with her thoughts.

By her left foot, she noticed a small, raggedy doll with a missing eye and several tufts of hair yanked up from the roots, giving it an almost pathetic look. Beside that, there was a wooden train, and farther on, a rubber ball that she recalled in a sudden explosion of images, fireworks in her mind.

_-Zell bouncing that same ball crazily off each wall, whooping with joy each time it rebounded into his hands-_

_-Seifer chucking it off Squall's forehead with an evil cackle-_

_-The ball thudding at her feet in the loose sand pulsing up between her toes, smelling of the ocean-_

"Here."

She snapped back to herself in time to feel the warmth of the mug Matron pushed into her hands, the sharp tang of cranberries weaving into her nostrils, riding on a long tendril of fragrant steam. She sipped carefully, savoring the excellent blend of fruits and spices. "Very nice. I'll have to get some for my dorm roo-" Quistis faltered mid-sentence, suddenly remembering that it would probably be a very long time before she returned to her dorm room. _If ever. _she thought bleakly.

Matron seemed to guess her thoughts. "I know Seifer isn't responsible for what happened."

"He isn't." Quistis agreed, adjusting her glasses. "I can corroborate his story, but no one's going to listen to me. There's a hysteria about the whole situation; people were screaming for his blood long before now, and Timber just…cemented their hatred of him." She wasn't sure that was exactly the right term to use; the world's loathing of Seifer Almasy had seemed pretty concrete to her before any of this had occurred.

She took another sip of her beverage. Was it the tea, or Matron's gentle presence lending her a peace of mind she hadn't felt in a long time? Here, in the place where she'd grown up, Quistis felt herself finally relax, glad to set aside the burden of simply surviving for a few hours. "But how can you be so sure he had nothing to do with it?"

Matron rocked her chair silently back and forth for a few minutes, circling one finger idly around the lip of her mug, having yet to take a drink out of it. "I've always had faith in Seifer." she said quietly after a moment. "I loved him so much-" Her eyes shimmered threateningly for a moment before she composed herself. "I loved you all, but especially him, because he needed it so much."

Needed it, but never really accepted it. Quistis mused. Maybe he just didn't know how; it was easier to push away then to pull toward you. She herself could relate to that.

"Matron." Quistis prompted gently, setting her tea aside and folding both hands primly in her lap. "I need you to tell me about Seifer. I need to understand him a little better if I'm going to help him. You're the one person who can help me with that." She dragged a slow look around the cheerful room, still bubbling over with the homey charm they must have adored as children. "I can only remember bits and pieces of him as a child. And trying to talk to him is like attempting to perform dental surgery on a T-Rexaur."

"I always thought it was a shame to use those Guardian Forces. Memories should never be taken forcefully away from someone like that."

_Some memories are better off taken away. _Seifer had collected a million of those types, Quistis felt sure.

Matron echoed her stance, putting her mug down on a nearby table and lacing together fingers that shook slightly. A glazed pain stole over each iris, the dark pools of brown frosting over into an opaque black. She stared off into space, seeing something Quistis couldn't. "Seifer was always difficult, even as a child. I didn't expect anything less, considering his background."

"How old was he when he was brought to the orphanage?"

"Six. It was the day before his seventh birthday." There had been cake and cheery hats to usher in the event, but he'd refused them all despite Matron and Cid's best efforts, huddling under his covers struggling not to cry inconsolably. She remembered that day very clearly, the tiny little bulge beneath mended blankets shaking uncontrollably, the green eyes squinching shut in fear every time someone innocently lifted a hand…

_"Seifer? Don't you want to come out and have some cake?" She perched lightly at the foot of his bed, burrowing her hands in the creases of her skirt, yearning to touch him but sensing that doing so would only provoke the frightened boy. _

_"No."_

_"It's very good cake. And there are presents." That one always got Zell; that, and her announcement that dinner was ready, with an extra burst of speed from the frantic little limbs if she happened to let slip that supper consisted of hot dogs. "Zell, Irvine and Quistis want to meet you." _

_"I can't have any friends." The blonde head poked out of the snarl of blankets just long enough to whip firmly back and forth. "Dad says I'll just kill 'em." _

She wiped helplessly at her eyes, remembering the exchange.

Quistis waited patiently, eyes resting without urgency on the older woman's face, offering no demands, simply intent. She felt insanely curious to delve into Seifer's past, dig up the roots that had formed the foundation for the bewildering young man. Maybe, if she could learn where some of his darkest whims originated from, she could help him bring them to the light, and confront them.

"A war orphan?" the young woman asked patiently as the silence stretched into what seemed forever.

"No." Matron paused over her next words, a profound sadness in her gaze now as she pulled her eyes away from the past and latched them onto Quistis' face. "Seifer wasn't an orphan, Quistis. His mother brought him here."

_That _shocked her, the revelation punching the air from Quistis' lungs, compressing her chest until she had to concentrate on each breath she drew, coaching her lips open to siphon breath, until finally oxygen resumed its normal flow throughout her body. Squall, of course, hadn't been an orphan either; but that was a different situation entirely, the little boy separated from his father in the confusion of losing Raine, then sought out again when President Loire confirmed the young commander's identity. In fact, at Rinoa's insistence they now visited one another weekly, father/son outings that Quistis suspected Squall actually enjoyed, even if he'd rather eat his own intestines than admit it.

"He learned at a very young age what it was to not be wanted."

"Why?" Quistis whispered, clenching her hands in the simple, unadorned dress, twisting the fabric around her fingers until all color bled from her knuckles. She saw him sitting in her classroom with his arms folded arrogantly behind his head, boots propped up on his desk, saw him saluting her cockily with his gun blade before purposefully darting off down a side path in the training center during a class drill. Had he constructed the shell of bravado around him because he was afraid of how brittle he might really be, how easily he might shatter if he let himself remember that even the woman who'd given him life didn't want him? Seifer loved Seifer because no one else would. And one could only function on hatred for so long.

"Seifer had a younger brother. A few months before his mother brought him here, there was an accident. I don't know the exact details of it; she wouldn't tell me. But essentially the story was that his younger brother drowned, and they blamed Seifer for it. His father refused to have anything to do with him after that; in fact, Almasy is his mother's maiden name. And finally, his mother just decided she couldn't look at him the same anymore. I don't know what his home life was like before his brother's death, but he'd obviously been abused when Cid and I took him in. He had bruises…everywhere." Her eyes streamed once more, the catch in her voice hiccupping Quistis' own breath. "I'm sorry." She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes. "He was just so…so _broken_. I felt so helpless. I didn't know what to do with him, except love him, and he didn't seem to want that. And now…now it's happened all over again. And it was my fault this time. My fault." she whispered, the guilt in her voice palpable.

"It's all right." Quistis said after a moment. "Seifer's…downfall was Ulticimea's doing, not yours. You were both her victims."

"I should have stopped it somehow. There should have been something I could have done. And now…the way he looks at me…" Matron trailed off, shook her head feebly, and buried her face in both palms.

Quistis could feel the woman's despair, as alive and pulsating as her own heartbeat, a tension that she felt just beneath her breasts, in the center of her chest. Her solar plexus shriveled around the sensation, reminding her of too-rough training sessions, usually with Seifer, the only time when either could really let loose all the things they kept buried deep beneath the surface.

A suspicious prickling stung her eyes; she hardened herself to the tears, tilting her face up to provide a slope down which the weak emotions could run, dripping off her like rainwater.

But she couldn't ease the ache in her chest, the gnawing sorrow that chewed steadily away at her innards. An ache that throbbed for Seifer, for the sobbing woman sitting across from her, neither of whom she could help. That rankled most of all, the helplessness, the fact that no matter what book she read or which monster she slew, nothing could reverse wrongs done and hearts broken. The emotions swirling so heavily around her couldn't be taped back together again, like a torn sheet of paper, or discarded into her 'I'll-look-at-it-later-when-I-have-more-coffee-and-patience' pile.

She stayed there, motionless, for a long time while Matron cried bitterly into her hands. It took her longer than she would have expected to work up the courage to kneel beside her 'mother' and slide hesitant arms around the trembling shoulders, the soldier in Quistis Trepe uncertain where to go from there. Where was Rinoa, or Selphie for that matter, when you really needed them?

Matron clutched her thankfully.

Quistis let her cry herself out, until at last Edea mumbled a teary 'thank you' and slipped off to the kitchen to wash her face, features composed if soaking wet. Then, straightening her dress, carefully, meticulously smoothing out each sleeve before she rose to her feet, Quistis wandered off in search of Seifer.

Truthfully, he was fucking scared.

Standing at the water's edge watching the ocean attempt to swallow his boots, Seifer held tightly to Hyperion, the gun blade his only piece of sanity in a world of chaos, the one sure thing in a place that fucking reeked of broken promises and long falls from glory.

He couldn't picture her eyes as they were now. Matron's eyes looked at him with doe-eyed softness, with the glowing affection of a mother whose offspring has returned to her after a long absence.

But it was Edea's eyes that he saw now, always and forever, snapping little lightning bolts of insanity at him from her glacially composed face. The woman lurking in the orphanage, staring at him from behind the curtain of her long hair, was not Matron. She had long disappeared for him. Now there was only the sorceress, the temptress who beckoned to him with the flick of a long finger and the wicked curve of her lips.

Seifer closed his eyes, lifting his face into the ocean breeze.

He wasn't strong enough to resist that a second time. Not that he'd had much luck resisting the first time; although really, had he even tried to? Her promises had dripped like honey from those lips, too sweet and enthralling for someone as weak as he to even think of turning from, and he'd swallowed them whole, like a man lost in a desert for days stumbling into an oasis with its beautiful pond. Eagerly, completely.

He heard Quistis' soft footsteps approaching him long before he sensed her take up position by his left elbow.

The hand gripping Hyperion tightened.

"It's funny." she said, the words fluttering away over the expanse of water before them.

He wanted to ask her just what the fuck could possibly be funny at a time like this, but he'd noticed since arriving at the orphanage that his mouth had ceased to function properly. Couldn't get his mind to fucking shut up, unfortunately.

"I must have come here a thousand times, yet I can barely remember it. Just a few brief glimpses of sand and water, and Squall sitting off by himself digging holes."

Seifer remembered gleefully filling those holes back in the second Puberty Boy clambered to his feet in triumph, kicking sand over both the opening and Squall's feet. He'd started a couple of fights that way; he could still feel the briny sting of seawater in open lacerations, as though it had only been yesterday that he and the stalwart young man had brawled in swelling ocean waves. If he looked hard enough, he thought he could even see two ghostly little figures, splashing through knee-deep water, haphazardly launching punches into one another with tiny fists.

"You should talk to her, Seifer."

The wind rolled in long gusts off peaceful little combers, taking hold of his bangs and flapping them across his scar, gilded by the sun's liquid gold.

He wondered what happened when a man drowned. Did the saturation of the lungs hurt, or did one black out before the real pain began? Could water actually hurt as much as he did most nights, darting from sleep into the chill reality of dawn, where the shadows from his dreams still stalked him? Seifer didn't think so.

He wondered what Quistis thought of drowning, if she'd ever looked at it from a purely academic view, if she was thinking now, as he was, of just wading into that tempting stretch of liquid and not looking back.

The wave playing lazily with his boot laces shifted, bubbling up around his ankle. It stung, but at least the sensation meant he was alive. He'd started to feel numb, standing here trying not to think about what waited just behind him.

He saw compassion in Quistis' eyes as her face ducked into his peripheral vision, and didn't want it. _Save it for someone who can actually use it. _

"She's…upset." _And ladies and gentlemen, this year's award for Understatement of the Century goes to…Quistis Trepe! Give her a big round of applause!_

He worked his tongue experimentally, prying it from the roof of his mouth. His throat felt arid, more parched than ground baking beneath a blazing summer sun. "I. Don't. Give. A. Fuck." He punctuated each word sharply, to make sure she got the point. She wasn't thick by any means, but she did have the persistence of Zell attempting to finagle hot dogs out of the lunch ladies.

"She was your only real family, Seifer."

"That's not Matron." he barked, shoulders stiffening. "Go away and leave me the fuck alone, Quistis. I'm not in the mood for your touchy-feely shit."

"You have to forgive her, and yourself, sooner or later." the young woman said simply, and then walked away, her dress nipping at slender ankles.

* * *

She sought him out anyway, despite her own reservations, despite the obvious don't-bother-me hunch of his body, the broad shoulders draped in a mantle of scarlet as the sun began its long descent.

Matron held one hand out for inspection, empty save for sunset's ruby light. "There's nothing here anymore, Seifer." she promised him quietly.

But he could only see that same hand, hurtling forward, the deadly sickle of ice that sprang from the pastel fingertips, straight into Squall's stomach. The power still beat like a second heartbeat there; he could see it even if she could not. And it called to him, just as he always knew it would.

"Seifer, please look at me. I never meant to hurt you. I promised to protect you, and I didn't, and you can never know how sorry I am for that."

That was the thing though, wasn't it? Promises just weren't worth shit in this world. At least he'd learned that early on, before naivety had the chance to settle in.

It should have made everything easier on him, because he'd never trusted any promise given to him; he'd always known it would be broken, and more often than not he'd been right. But when she grazed her hand lightly over the top of his head, he realized it still fucking _hurt_, more than her voice in his ears ever had, or Quistis' whip snapping for his throat. She hurt him; just her mere presence made him want to twist himself into fetal position and sob brokenly, the same way he had the first few weeks of his stay at the orphanage. Then it had been his brother he cried for, his choked gurglings swimming venomously in Seifer's ears. Now he didn't know where this pain originated from, but he wanted it to stop. He wanted to shove Hyperion through his own stomach and carve out the part of himself that still felt anything, just because numbness had to be preferable to this…_torture_.

The hand stroked softly across his hair, once more, then again.

She sifted the buttery strands ever-so-lightly, terrified of scaring him off.

"You followed me into hell, didn't you, Seifer?" Matron whispered.

_You _promised _me. _he thought savagely, and despite all he knew of promises and their fickleness, he felt the betrayal sharp and hot in his guts, like a knife rammed through his intestines.

_I followed you because you said I'd be great, and I was tired of being a fuck-up. _

She crouched next to him in the sand, her profile calmly poignant.

_Please Hyne, don't run away from me anymore, Seifer. _she prayed silently. _I love you. You are my son, no matter where you came from or what's happened. _

The distilled rage in his eyes almost shattered her. Filtered through a forced nonchalance, it still existed, potent and terrible, the same fury she could dimly remember feeding off. Looking at him, she heard the same laughter that chased him into his dreams, and jerked away, an involuntary gasp tearing itself from her throat.

He looked almost triumphant. "Like what you see, _Matron_?"

_Dear Hyne. _She was still there, still inside him, a poisoned sliver that hadn't yet worked its way loose. Maybe it never would. Ulticimea's claws had been sharp ones, hooked so deep into Edea's own psyche that she couldn't help damaging her mind when she tore them free.

Ulticimea was a raw wound he wouldn't let anyone touch.

Seifer let her probe his gaze just long enough to determine that, then turned his back on her.

She returned to the house tired and utterly defeated. Quistis only nodded when Matron announced that she was going to bed, handing her the borrowed dress, neatly folded into a tidy square. She felt far more capable back in her own clothes now, the housewife attire of the older woman giving her an almost out-of-body experience, the softly feminine outfit utterly foreign to her.

Studiously, she swept her hair into one hand and pinned it into a neat updo, the faintest whisper of Matron's perfume crawling in her nostrils.

Feeling a pang of regret in her chest, even though she'd pretty much already predicted this outcome, Quistis stared wistfully at the tightly shut door of Matron's bedroom, then flicked her eyes toward the nearest window.

She could see him, just barely, a silvery figure touched with fingers of red and mauve, the merging colors joining together in a fuzzy, distant halo around his body. The green eyes were too far away for her to make out, but Quistis could imagine them smoldering with either a latent rage or pain, perhaps even a combination of the two.

She shook her head and turned away from the window, just as the forest beyond the beach came alive with shadows, black silhouettes that detached from the waving boughs of their shelter and began to slither toward the solitary figure sitting on the sand.

Timber Police Station

Timber

"Ow! That's my nose Selphie!"

"Irvy, Zell, stop moving!"

"Darlin', you're going to have to climb a little faster. You ain't as light as you look."

A lethal pause. "Did you just call me fat, Irvy?"

"What? I didn't say anything."

"You just said I'm not as light as I look."

"That wasn't me, Selph darlin.' Dincht was the only one opening his big mouth."

"Hey! I did not! Ouch! Selphie!"

Glaring up at the perky young woman from his vantage point beneath her foot, the dainty little shoe planted firmly on one of his shoulders, the other resting on Irvine's, Zell received a pleasant little eyeful of the lacy black panties she wore under her short skirt. Unfortunately, Irvine caught him eyeing the goods and, breaking his usual languid nonchalance, punched him hard in the side of the arm.

"Ow, man! Frickin' hell, Kinneas!" he protested, almost dropping Selphie.

"Mine." Irvine hissed, the word nearly drowned by the sudden tinkle of glass as the petite, delicate-looking woman smashed her elbow into the window before her in a decidedly un-delicate manner. Thin glass yielded easily to her blow, crumpling inward over the darkened building interior beyond. A moment later, she crawled into the room's inky blackness, swallowed entirely by the baleful eye of the destroyed window.

The two men stood glaring at each other for several seconds, Zell rubbing his arm and glowering darkly, temper boiling hotly. He broke the tense stare down after a moment and moodily shadow boxed while they waited for Selphie to unlock the main entrance, feet dancing an intricate pattern across withered grass.

"Ok boys!" they heard her whisper a moment later, and, checking to be sure they remained undetected, darted stealthily around the side of the building and through the front doors.

She stood just inside, unwrapping the piece of material she'd twined around one arm to deaden the impact of her elbow on solid glass, shaking free little shimmering splinters. "You, start there." she demanded, pointing Zell toward a series of file cabinets stored along the east wall. "Irvy, you go there." she barked, indicating another row of the standard issue gray cupboards. She sounded remarkably like a drill seargent, the cutsey features taking on a stern cast, prompting Zell to snap mockingly to attention and toss her a sarcastic salute.

"Ma'am yes ma'am!"

"Jest get over there, Dincht."

He obeyed this time, not without some reluctance since he was still a little miffed by Irvine's sucker punch, but the glint in the cowboy's eyes warned him to keep his mouth shut. And while he knew he could take the other man in hand to hand combat despite the difference in their sizes, you couldn't karate chop a bullet, as Irvine was fond of saying.

"Geez." Zell muttered under his breath, swaggering over to his assignment, grumbling a few half-hearted profanities, his attention already scurrying off in another direction. Shaking his head, the martial artist dropped down on his ass, folding his limbs in cross-legged position and yanking out the drawer in front of him. He spent a few seconds rifling through the files contained within, fingers zipping hyperactively past nondescript folders before he twisted around toward his companions. "Guys!" he bellowed, elicting winces from both Selphie and Irvine. "These are all too old! Nothin' in here about Seifer or that old lady!"

"Keep it down. This is a stealth mission, Dincht. You wanna' broadcast our position to everyone in Timber?" Irvine shook his head as he turned back to his own search. Sometimes he really questioned Cid's wisdom in awarding Zell SeeD status. The man possessed no equal in unarmed combat--at least not that any of them had encountered--but he contained all the subtlty of a speeding locomotive. Or Seifer Almasy. He wondered how Zell would take such a comparison to the green-eyed ex-knight; not very well, he mused. The kind of not very well that ended with his foot buried in body cavities that Irvine personally felt should always be classified as exit only.

He browsed for a while longer, watching Zell get to his feet out of the corner of one eye and begin to wander around, throwing a few light punches, even adding a couple back springs for good measure, keeping his reflexes sharp as he peered curiously around the cramped station.

Not much to it, really; Timber didn't have much need of a huge police force, not until recently at least, what with the murder of the Trabia Garden students and the suspicious disappearance of the animated Rosemary they'd questioned yesterday. The station boasted only four simple wooden desks, tidy almost to the point of utilitarian, only the occasional picture and smiley-faced coffee mug lending a personalized touch. Paperwork looked to be oddly absent, the deficiency of towering piles an abnormal sight to the three, used to popping inside Quistis' office at random hours to find her buried behind huge mounds of the stuff.

Irvine strode over to the desk nearest him and leafed curiously through the notebook resting in its center, but closed it a moment later after locating nothing interesting.

_Damn. _He'd really hoped to find something of use--a case file, officers' notes, anything really--regarding either Seifer or Rosemary Rickley, who failed to show up to open her vegetable stand that morning, something which had not occurred in over three years, according to the woman who ran the stall beside her. Visiting the simple brown residence identified as hers by 'Mellie' hadn't turned anything up either; all knocks remained unanswered, and though they discovered a back door unlocked and partially open, a search of the place revealed nothing ominous or even remotely suspicious.

Irvine didn't like it. The fact that she'd spent only the day before blithely informing them that Galbadian soldiers committed several murders for which Seifer Almasy was shouldering the blame, only to turn up missing the very next day, did not sit well with him.

His head whipped around as a sudden noise alerted him, brown ponytail whisking with a brief sting across one cheek. A footfall, just outside the building. "Shit!" he swore, motioning Selphie toward him.

He could tell by the look on her face that she'd heard the sound as well. Sweat dampened his palms, a slick glaze of anxiety that coated the fingers thickly and crept as an irritating prickle along his neck. He felt his heart rate speed up, pushing adrenaline through the veins, into the suddenly parched interior of his mouth. He tasted it on his tongue, bitter steel against the taste buds.

Selphie launched herself for the window as the doorknob rattled.

Irvine spun around, scooping a hand frantically toward Zell in a follow-me gesture the short blonde ignored.

"Go, you guys!" he hissed. "I'll distract 'em!"

_Bad idea. _a voice chimed instantly inside the sharpshooter's skull. Zell and distractions usually ended in disaster…or really big explosions. Sometimes a combination of the two, depending on just how large a boom he made.

"No way, man! We're leavin' here together!"

"Don't worry, I brought these!" his friend hissed at him, and raced over to the desk lamp they'd flicked on upon entering, deciding to risk the shadowed flare of illumination fanning from beneath the dusty lampshade in order to ease their search a bit. The moonlight filtering through Selphie's entry point barely stained the floor with its mercury shine, too weak to really aid their eyes.

In a flash of gold, Irvine spied two cylindrical objects in Zell's hands, illuminated briefly before his friend snapped the light off.

Crap. Those looked like…firecrackers.

Zell shot him a thumbs-up and grinned cheekily.

It was some primal instinct inside him that set off raucous sirens throughout his mind, warnings peals that pried Seifer's eyes open.

They slid from the trees like poison, silent death that crept through the bloodstream and into the heart, painted in the soft blood glow of sunset.

He felt his heart stutter, then stall completely. The bitch had betrayed them, the realization shooting ribbons of agony down his veins and into the pit of his stomach, burning with all the heat of the sun slung low on the distant horizon.

The bitch had betrayed them, and Quistis was still in the house with her.

Seifer bolted to his feet, flailing a little in loose sand, then tore off at a dead sprint for the cheerful cottage, glowing with the same fire that snagged in their eyes and spilled like gore across the ocean.

The air seared his lungs, lighting a blaze in his chest that consumed his heart, until he swore he felt it burn down to useless cinders. Its ash scattered through him, choking his throat and blurring his vision, smearing the colorful flowers that adorned the walkway he rushed up into a meaningless haze. His brisk flight past them set the plants to dancing on their stalks, heads bobbing in protest.

He didn't see them. He didn't see them, or the door looming just in front of him, or the ocean still sweeping broad paintbrush strokes of wetness across the sand like nothing had changed. His eyes found Quistis instead, sought her out with starling clarity despite the building separating them, and he watched her fall, disbelief in the blue eyes as the shard of ice pierced her through the mid-section and she vanished into swirling darkness while the woman who had once been her mother laughed.

No. That had been Squall. Squall, who suffered the full brunt of her power. Squall, who dangled from the wall with shadows in his tired eyes as Seifer gladly tortured him.

But he saw only Quistis now, writhing beneath the sharpened daggers of Edea's nails, slashed across the throat and leaking blood in a rapid gush down the front of her neat clothing.

His shoulder rammed the door, almost tearing it off its hinges.

He burst inside and slammed it behind him, panting and wild-eyed, startling Quistis, kneeling on the floor holding a doll in one hand, a wistful smile teasing the edges of her mouth.

She stood up quickly, the toy falling from her slack fingers. "Seifer, what's wrong?"

Matron, roused by the noise of his entrance, slipped from her room, blinking with an alertness that betrayed how elusive sleep proved. She looked almost heartbreakingly young despite the gray in her hair, wide-eyed and frightened by the malice in the gaze he stabbed at her.

His finger followed the razor edge of his stare, jabbing accusingly at her. "She sold us out to the Galbadians! We need to get the hell out of here."

Quistis, paler than usual, took a step toward the dark-haired woman. "I'm not leaving her behind."

"Don't be a fucking idiot! She betrayed us to them; they're not going to hurt their precious little lapdog." he snarled.

"I haven't told anyone you were here!"

"Save it, bitch." Seifer spat at her, clenching a hand around Quistis' arm and yanking her toward the back door. He caught the shocked look on Quistis' face, that he would speak to the woman who'd cared so passionately for them so spitefully. He didn't give a flying fuck; he'd never been one for pleasantries anyway, but particularly not to some gentle-faced whore who'd tricked him twice now with her soft eyes and smiles, the knife in his back twisting that much deeper.

It was probably too late, he realized frantically, towing a struggling Quistis along behind him; already a few of them probably circled around to the back, cinching the noose tight, the sights of their weapons just waiting to line up with his scarred face.

"Seifer, stop!" Quistis yelled, wrenching her arm away and half-turning from him just as the front door exploded open, splinters spiraling outward to embed in the one-eyed doll.

A polished boot nudged aside the door's remnants, the snout of a rifle nosing after it.

Matron stepped in front of Quistis.

The first shot boomed in the small cottage, and the reverberation tore at his eardrums, the same way her voice had, the same way Quistis' nails ripped into the skin of his forearm.

Matron's head exploded.

Quistis actually screamed as blood scorched her cheeks, stumbling back into Seifer's arms, the strong limbs grasping her waist with iron force. She tasted Matron's gore in her mouth, scented the awful reek of her perfume mixed with the stench of gunpowder. They were smells she recognized from a lifetime ago, battlefield odors that slithered into the pores and lay dormant there, trapped forever beneath the skin no matter how hard one scrubbed.

She watched a clotted piece of brain matter glide down the collar of her shirt, between her breasts, watched Matron's body sway and crumble in front of her, half the woman's forehead disintegrated into smashed pieces of bone and tiny beads of garnet.

The soldier inside Quistis swallowed vomit, forced it back down as Seifer dragged her away, her useless feet eventually clumsily helping him along as he practically threw her out the back exit onto the sandy shore. She saw a flash of movement behind a large rock, and bleakly, automatically struck out with Save the Queen.

The tip of her weapon snapped its barbs into the throat of the man lurking there, and snagged.

He cried out in panic and dropped his gun.

Quistis flicked her wrist, the hooks disengaging from him, leaving only a superficial line of red across his neck as he fell to his knees in the sand, nothing more than a scratch compared to what she might have done to him.

Then she remembered that one of his comrades had just murdered Matron.

She conjured fire in her palm, and slammed the blistering globe straight into the man's face, the flesh melting away, curling in charred flakes from the grinning apparition of his skull. Tears that she didn't even feel streaming down her face, Quistis shoved harder with the spell, ramming it right down his throat, tongues of orange bursting through his esophagus and exiting from the flesh of his neck.

The bones of his esophagus cracked, singeing to an ashen gray that reminded her of the filaments of silver snaking through Matron's dark mane.

He didn't feel half the pain that she did now, the anguish a keening wail tucked just behind her tongue, mental torment that scoured her brain raw and rubbed salt in the open wound.

Seifer grabbed her by the wrist.

The touch grounded her somewhat, brought her back to earth, and gasping, weighted down with horror by what she'd just done, Quistis felt herself sag limply.

He caught her before she hit the ground.

The attack of weakness passed quickly; she had trained for this sort of brutality since entering Garden at the age of ten, though she had never killed someone quite so viciously before, a loss of control that still burned like the madness she'd once seen in his eyes.

Together they ran for the ocean, Quistis casting a hasty shell of Protect around them, the bubble shimmering ethereally. She thanked Hyne she'd always been so diligent about staying junctioned as bullets chewed the sand at their heels, frustrated nips by teeth dulled, sawed down by her spell.

Somehow, Quistis found her hand tangled in his as Seifer leapt toward the sparkling water, arching out in a smooth dive that carried her down with him into an murky abyss.

_Hyne._

He'd forgotten matches.

Zell chucked the useless tubes vaguely in the direction of the two men entering the police station, and dove behind the desk boasting the smiley-faced coffee mug just as the light flashed on.

"Right there!" a sharp voice rang out, and he peeked carefully from his hiding spot to see a stern-faced man dressed in rumbled pajamas pointing at Irvine's back, the cowboy freezing mid-hunch as he ducked low to clear the window's frame.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. So much for his great distraction. So much for making a name for himself, as the one who'd single-handedly rescued the situation when the mission began to slide toward failure status. Or it would have anyway, if this were an actual mission and not a little…side trip they all hoped Squall would never uncover.

_Think, Dincht! _Zell scolded himself.

He could see the man barreling toward Irvine, almost right on top of him now.

Half-panicked, he reached abruptly for the buckle of his pants in a flash of inspiration, and roughly yanked the fly open, pulling his shirt over his head at the same time and tying it securely around the bottom half of his face. Then, shedding his pants and boxers, he whooped loudly, and darted out into full view of both stunned men.

He felt it suck him down, in the vicious hold of a demon determined to leech his life away, and she was no longer there, ripped away from him in a tangle of hair that lashed Seifer like golden seaweed. The boil of Quistis' air bubbles fled between pursed lips, her precious life force escaping into the water around them.

_No. _

He struggled against the current he'd forgotten about, reaching out to graze his fingertips uselessly against her shirt as it ballooned out around her. _No!_

Her eyes, frightened and dark with pain, vanished into the sea's gaping maw.

Dread broke free of his stomach, winging up into his throat, a twisted writhe of dark imagination and barely suppressed nausea. Sick to his stomach, the bead of perspiration against upper lip and forehead snatched away by the ocean's salty depths, Seifer thrashed in her general direction, even the subtle glow of Protect snuffed out by the black waters now.

Fucking Hyne, he couldn't let Quistis be taken from him like this. He didn't know why, but here, in the roiling tide that tossed him back and forth like a child's toy, Seifer realized he could not let her die like this, in the dark and alone, as he'd lived most of his life. Gunned down on the battlefield, bleeding out into a meadow stained with the gore of her comrades, that was her soldier's death, the blaze of glory that finally snuffed her out.

Not this cold and chaotic atmosphere, alien and terrifying, like the twisting labyrinth of his mind.

Darkness tainted the edges of his vision, black and crawling, coaxing his brain toward unconciousness.

Determined, Seifer pushed himself forward, parting the dark veil of the liquid around him, swimming across the current and into a pocket of calmness. He stroked through that into swirling madness once more, squinting against the brackish sting of the ocean poking needles of pain through his eyes and into his brain.

He chased wisps of gold, just barely visible in the sea's harsh environment.

_Please, please, please, please. _he whispered to himself, a ceaseless prayer that beat its fists against the inside of his skull.

_Please Hyne don't let her die. _Don't let her die the same death of the woman who lay blank-eyed and staring in the cottage by the sea, brutal and too-quick. Not the bullet which had severed her grasp on life; no, to him she'd been dead long before that, killed just as senselessly by another's ambitions.

He could hear Ulticimea laughing at him again, ridiculing his efforts.

_Let her go, little boy. _The thread of her voice shredded his ears raw. _You can't have her; she is good and precious and strong, all the things that you are not, and you'll just lose her in the end anyway. Something like that does not cling to decay, to a man who is rotting from the inside. _

Something grazed the top of his head; he recoiled in automatic horror at the phantom touch of fingers once infused with life, too-still and milky white now. They caressed his hair, their movement riding on the crest of his frenzied motion, in a horrible caricature of a lover's tender touch. Blonde hair, sliding along his collarbone, his chest, yellow tendrils that embraced him with the fervent eagerness of that same lover, but none of the warmth.

_No. _the word stuttered about his mind, suffocating it, suppressing any other thought process.

Why were the feisty blue eyes shut, the pale rose of her lips faded to the dull white of ancient bones, the moonlight flesh sapped to the hue of a photograph left out in the sun to rot and curl around the edges?

_No. _

His stomach coiled around his spine. He felt it settle against each vertebrae, bone pressing sharply into the churning of his gut. He would throw up any moment now, pollute the water around them with acid vomit, heave until his stomach itself crept up his throat and erupted into the water in a shriveled mass.

Seifer reached numbly for her billowing shirt, plucking at its undulating front. Dimly, he perceived the last of his air snort through flaring nostrils, trailing away as casually as dandelion wisps into a windy summer sky. Liquid would follow, stalking back along those diminishing bubbles, until his own features bleached to chalk.

At least she looked peaceful.

He pulled her limp body into his arms, burying his face in her neck. His heart might have splintered at the sight, if it hadn't already burned down to an isolated ember.

Seifer felt a few strands of her hair wrap lazily around him.

He tried to imagine them as the arms of the mother he'd had for too short a time, but even that sensation faded gradually away as the ocean deftly parted his lips and burrowed into his lungs.

He'd known from their first meeting that Zell was…different. In a good way for the most part, of course, because if nothing else he was at the very least entertaining. One could always expect something out of the blue to occur while in the presence of Zell Dincht.

This, however, exceeded even Irvine's expectations, and didn't fall into the category of 'good way.' He did not define 'good' as watching slack-jawed while his friend hooted and strutted around naked, his shirt concealing the tattooed features but leaving everything else just…hanging out.

Sure, he'd found himself in the communal showers with the martial artist a few times, and never really been perturbed by the sight, but then again he spent that time looking after his own hygiene and not bothering to ogle his friends' asses. He'd taken the obligatory peek, to ensure blackmail material, such as the surprising amount of hair sported by Squall over his backside and the tattoo on Zell's left cheek that read 'Mikey Was Here' in a slapdash script, but other than that he preferred to spend the time rinsing out his hair and thinking about the girl's locker room just across from their own.

It was the only thing that seemed to block Zell's horrific singing. It wasn't a non-talent he indulged often in, but unfortunately for Irvine's ears, it seemed that something about hot water and bar soap wheedled Zell's inner vocalist to the surface.

"Irvy, what's going on?" Selphie hissed from the ground, looking up at him.

"Trust me, you don't want to know."

"Where's Zell?"

"Uh…" he said, the normally eloquent young man tripping over an explanation. He didn't really want to think about it himself, much less take the time to explain to her the events transpiring just behind him. The sight of…Zell Jr. just hanging out--and not just hanging there, but performing more of a kind of perverse dance in rhythm to the young man's jittery motion--wasn't something Irvine really preferred to dwell on. "Jest forget about it. Better off not knowin' darlin,' trust me."

He boosted himself out the window, and dropped down beside her.

A momentary pang of guilt shot throught his veins as he grabbed Selphie by the hand and dragged her along behind him toward the town's main square. He hated leaving a man behind like that--it went completely against the hero complex that predictably accompanied the dashing cowboy attire, and Irvine's rapid footsteps faltered slightly as hesitation sang effervescently in his bloodstream.

But abandoning a team mate only nagged his conscience when said team mate was in dire peril of either capture or death, and he did have Selphie to think of.

He hadn't spotted weapons on either of the men, and honestly…who in the hell wanted to tackle _that_?

Quistis felt cognizant thought seep into her battered mind gradually, circling through the haze of unawareness with the lazy nonchalance of leaves spinning around a storm drain.

She tasted blood, and sand, a sticky amalgamation on the tongue, a stain across her soul as she remembered that blood was not all hers. It stung her eyes, captured in the roots of thick eyelashes, quivering as though it yearned for freedom and yet unwilling to take the final plunge into liberty.

No. The young woman realized with distant shock. Those were not ruby beads dangling from her eyes, but diamond ones, acid tears dissolving the grime of beach and battle. _I'm not crying. _she thought in disblief. She had last cried ten, almost eleven years ago, as that shiny black car slid to a halt before Matron and Cid's quaint cottage, and somewhere, a soft voice called to her, telling her gently of her new home.

_"But I don't _want _a new home." _The words of the child, spoken now in the voice of the woman.

Nothing made sense. She'd gone to sleep in a cold hell, and woken on a lonely stretch of beach in the middle of nowhere.

_And where's Seifer? _

He'd grasped her hand in his, fed the warmth of his body into the cold, cold shell of Quistis Trepe through the conduit of his fingers, and only that had kept her from flying apart into a million pieces, bursting at the seams from the pain and horror of the last few moments.

Her first mother died in the sterile confines of a hospital room, gasping her last breaths through a ventilator that turned the pasty face into an alien life form, one that terrified the six-year-old Quistis Trepe more than any fanciful monsters lurking in the closet ever had.

The second perished in a fountain of blood and bone that should have seemed familiar to her, the whine of bullets part of the soundtrack of her soldier's life.

But now, lying motionless in the sand, so immobile she might have been dead--because that was how she felt, completely lifeless, just a carcass holding a fractured soul that would at any moment slither free--she saw nothing familiar about Matron's death. It had been brutal, frightening, and completely foreign. It was an impossibility Quistis had never considered.

And now, remembering it twisted something inside her, wringing any memories of joy from her the same way his gun wrung the life from Matron's tender doe eyes. Pain--a roaring kind of agony that prevented any other emotion--seared her lungs, swimming like fire in her veins, electricity beneath the skin that shriveled the heart and crushed the brain.

On a lonely stretch of beach in the middle of nowhere, a young woman who hadn't shed real tears since her induction into Garden sobbed until she threw up.

_Flash._

_"We gather here today in memory of Jacob Riley Bergenson, not to mourn his death, but to celebrate his life."_

_Flash._

_"A cruel twist of fate stole him from us too soon, but his memory will live on in the hearts of his friends and family."_

_Flash._

_He stood looking down into his brother's coffin, wondering why Jacob refused to open his eyes despite Seifer's most fervent pleas and threats. His brother never, ever ignored him; pestered him, yes, borrowed his toys without asking, and occasionally even hit him when he'd gathered sufficient anger to make him brave. _

_But never had he just lain there, utterly still and waxen, the same color as his mother's favorite figurine--the one Jacob had broken a little over a week ago._

_Their mother seemed to have forgiven him for that now. _

_Flash._

_He squinted against the bobbing glow, a white-hot sear imprinted across the pupils of his squinting eyes. Lifting a hand, shading it across a furrowed brow, Seifer sought the origination of the painful shine, and found it on his brother's chest. _

_Small and round, it imprisoned the sunlight perfectly, and shot little winking beams of it directly into Seifer's gaze. He recognized the piece of jewelry, a necklage he'd made himself in a rare moment of brotherly affection. He wanted to feel pride that his brother was wearing it on what seemed to be such an important day--but that awful, choking fear, the kind that burrowed tunnels through his heart like a maggot through diseased meat, kept him oddly cowed. _

_He heard that word again--death, and shuddered even though he couldn't completely understand its concept. He knew what his father had screamed at him--"You killed him! Your brother's dead!"--but he hadn't really known what he meant, even as the chair shattered above his head and splinters gouged his cheeks. He'd recognized it as horrible, but he didn't know it meant that Jabob would never again play in the nearby corn field with him, or scare away his trout while he fished in the stream by their house. _

_He didn't know it, until they shut the lid of the coffin, stopping his intense scrutiny of his brother's face, and began to heave shovefuls of dirt onto the plain wooden box. He screamed then, high and long, the shriek of a child who does not understand, who is panicked because reality has just closed its abusive fists around their throat and strangled naivety from them._

_A week later, when his father finally crawled from the depths of his bottle and started beating him, Seifer knew 'death' was his fault._

He smelled peaches, mixed with that elusive hint of fragrance he still couldn't identify.

_Quistis. _Quistis had smelled like peaches; he wrapped the perfume around him like a comforting blanket, burying himself beneath those layers and away from the memories scenting him out like hound dogs on the hunt.

_Underwater, he hadn't been able to smell the peaches. _

Seifer snapped into full awareness, the scratch of sand hot beneath his cheek while the ocean's cold grasp heaved at his ankles.

He staggered to both feet, spitting sand from his mouth, shaking it from his clothes as he tried to orient himself. He found Hyperion at his waist, and that reassured him, just for a moment, the feel of his always-faithful companion under his fingers a soothing balm to Seifer's confusion.

He watched the sea drag itself toward him before giving up the struggle and crashing backward, a ceaseless back and forth motion under the moon's guiding light. Above him, night spread in full bloom, casting the beach around him into a dark plum that trailed off into tones of black beyond the shadow that full moonlight granted him. He watched shadow Seifer flicker across the sands as sporadic clouds wisped past the moon, and shut his eyes.

He'd had her. He'd _had _her, and then he hadn't. He'd let her go, let her die. He'd killed her, the same way he killed everything good in this shitty world.

Starting young must have predisposed him toward banishing the decent and nurturing the malignant.

He stood for a long time with his face tipped into the slight breeze rolling off the ocean, until at least something inside Seifer persuaded him to move, forced him to shuffle his feet around until they pointed toward the shelter of the dunes several feet away from the water. He walked like a prisoner toward them, like a man burdened down with twenty pound weights on each ankle. He couldn't remember ever having to concentrate so hard on the mere act of lifting one foot and placing it in front of the other, but now simply walking used up all his energy.

Maybe, with each failure, Hyne added a little more weight, until at last it hit you all at once and you simply collapsed.

If that was the case, he should have been reduced to fucking crawling years ago.

Seifer watched her hair slide around him again, golden and glowing even under sheets of heavy water.

She had died, while his own heart kept stuttering uselessly onward inside his chest. Fucking ironic, the people Hyne decided to spare.

He almost made it to the dunes before his knees gave out and he dropped, folding like a limp rag doll hurled by a child in a fit of anger. His cheek impacted the ground once more--and stopped, while Seifer lay still, pulling breath into his lungs and wondering why he still possessed the ability to do so. They should have seized up by now, should have quit accepting precious oxygen into a skeleton of a man a long time ago. His soul was dead. Why couldn't the rest of him fucking follow?

Crunching down, finding little grains that cracked between his teeth, Seifer stared sightlessly down the shoreline to his right, his gaze stumbling over a patch of light against the dark purple sands. It didn't move, but still he recognized it as human in form.

Then he picked up the strands of yellow--almost white in contrast to the shadowy beach--and nearly threw up. Hyne was a cruel little fucker, to wash Quistis' body onto the same stretch he'd managed to wind up on. Maybe it was a lesson, forcing him to face yet another of his failures; maybe if he looked straight into the magnitude of his worst mistakes, he'd eventually stop making them. _Fucking unlikely. _

Quistis' body moved.

He stared dumbfounded at it for several moments, until he saw the motion repeat itself, and suddenly, Seifer found himself on both feet, with no recollection of how he'd gotten there. His body burst into action a moment later, the same legs which had found it so impossible to function just a few minutes earlier now flying, pounding across the sand faster than they'd ever carried him before. If it were possible for a man's legs to detach themselves from the main body and take off on their own, Seifer thought his might do so.

His mad scramble toward her lasted an eternity; the birth of the entire world hadn't taken this long.

Hyperion banged against his thigh; he ignored it, because any small amount of reassurance offered by the length of steel suddenly seemed inconsequential compared to that slight spasm in her limbs. He wanted her to sit up and bark a demand for his homework; odd thoughts, when he hadn't attended classes in nearly a year, and she was spread out like a fallen angel across night-soaked sands and not in that fucking classroom of hers she so adored.

Seifer skidded in the loose landscape, nearly fell, then recovered and kept running.

"Quistis!" Her name emerged as a gravelly rasp, too quiet next to the steady pounding of the sea.

She twitched again as he collapsed next to her, breathing hard.

In the moonlight, he saw her eyes staring wide and open into the sky overhead, and his heart turned over in his chest, then stopped completely. Fucking Hyne, he'd been wrong; the shudder of the pale limbs had been only the ocean, tugging them into motion, a heartbreaking misrepresentation of life. The disappointment crushed his gut into a miniscule cube; his throat closed down to a pinhole, the oxygen he didn't deserve abruptly garroted. His breath was a thin whistle lost beneath the endless crash of waves.

Quistis blinked.

He felt his heart slowly chug to life once more, like a stubborn old engine wrestling with the thought of turning over.

She'd lost her glasses.

Without them, pale even in comparison to the pallid disc looming in the sky above them, she reminded him of the child he'd chased down a beach just like this one, the ghost of that blue-eyed adolescent carving large letters into the sand with determined strokes. Then, he'd kicked over her sand castles and made her cry by sticking wet clumps of the stuff down her shirt. Now, he simply stared at her, seawater and maybe even something else stinging his eyes.

His face smeared together with the moonlight above her.

She tried to bring his features into focus, tried to pin down the fuzzy outline that seemed vaguely familiar to her, but tears and brackish water and the loss of her glasses combined to thwart her efforts. Instead, Quistis chose to concentrate on the cold water slowly devouring her calves, creeping over her soggy, ripped clothing into the lines of her flesh. It was a far easier task, siphoning her attention toward that single sensation, then trying to identify the stranger kneeling over her, or thinking about Matron and exploding heads.

Eventually, she shut her eyes again.

Seifer didn't know how long he crouched there with the sea eating the tips of his boots and the stress lines fracturing his chest widening into earthquake fissures, but eventually, he slipped his arms very gently underneath her, and lifted her from the ground like the child she resembled.

Then, without a single hint of weakness in his step this time, he set off up the beach with her dangling from his grasp.


	10. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

Cid Kramer's Office

Balamb Garden

Three weeks after his wife's death, Cid Kramer attempted suicide.

Squall found him. He entered the still room with his hands full of paperwork, the dormant quiet suggesting that Garden's Headmaster was not in residence, as he'd tended to be these past few weeks. That was all right--Squall could just as easily leave the reports on his desk and then slink quietly off to the solitude of his own office, where more paperwork and his phone, blinking out a dozen unheard messages, awaited him. He hated to bother Cid considering the circumstances, but the flux of calls and political demands had increased tenfold since Edea's murder, and he simply couldn't get any further until Cid took a look at a few of the more official documents and signed off on them.

Trabia Garden in particular was starting to get extremely pushy in demanding to speak with 'real authority' as the school's headmaster put it, and not some green kid trying to play leader. He wanted the deaths of his students avenged yesterday, of course, and no amount of Squall's insistent protests that no, B. Garden was most certainly not harboring Seifer Almasy, caused the snobby asshole to let up. He'd broken three coffee mugs already dealing with the jerk, hurtling them with a frustrated scream he just barely choked back into the wall across from his desk.

And now this nonsense from Timber, about a break-in at the local police station, conducted, supposedly, by three of Garden's own people, including one very naked young man identified by a tattoo on the side of his face and another plastered across one ass cheek reading 'Mikey Was Here.' He didn't know what the hell those three thought they were doing, but crisis or no crisis, he was going to give them the ass reaming of their lives when they finally returned. And if Ragnarok didn't come back in one piece…well, Rinoa kept him in plenty of pencils--ones tipped in fuzzy pink smiley faces, no less; just his style--and he vowed to insert every single one of them up Zell's ass.

_Who the hell breaks into a police station naked anyway? _Squall brooded grouchily.

It was that fateful creaking that eased his attention away from the problems currently bowing his shoulders beneath an imaginary weight--imaginary, yet somehow all too tangible, like fifty pound dumbbells set on the shoulder blades--just a faint ribbon of noise through the silence.

A silence that struck Squall as unnatural, creepily…thick, he realized, setting the paperwork on the corner of Cid's desk. It was a calm-before-the-storm kind of quiet, the kind that rushed a soldier's blood in his ears and spat adrenaline through the veins.

He looked around, seeing nothing out of place, just the usual cheerfully unkempt interior with its few plants and framed photographs, and the open file cabinet drawers introducing peeks of student records to the wandering eye. The drawn blinds oppressed the atmosphere, the once sunny openness of the room drenched in storm clouds of depression that the young man could practically feel, phantom spectators in the mind and heart.

His eyes flickered across the floor, sliding across a few slivers of glass, glittering in the darkness. Frowning, Squall leaned down to examine them, tracking the source to a dropped photograph lying facedown on the floor beneath Cid's desk. He flicked it vaguely with the tip of his finger, the tip of it unfurling onto the cold tiles, flapping up just enough to reveal strands of raven black. Edea, obviously; he shook his head, a pang of sadness sliding into his heart like the coldest shard of ice despite himself. Mostly, he could only remember the cold eyes, lit from within to a crystallized honey hue, buttering their usual mahogany shade with a rich amber. But it was the kind of amber that formed tree sap, snaring insects in its deadly adhesive and hardening into a prison around feebly buzzing wings. He could remember flying straight into that tree sap himself, drowning in it, then being shoved brutally away, impaled through the stomach by the same shard of ice that stabbed now through his bloodstream.

Sometimes, though, he recalled glimpses of her in simple cotton dresses, bandaging a cut he'd no doubt gotten from Seifer, or baking cookies in a sunny kitchen, her soft perfume mixing with the scent of chocolate chips. Those were the memories he liked to store away in the place he usually only reserved for Rinoa's smiles, a sense of 'home' that he might have, once, been able to claim as his own. He wasn't the type of person who used to care about homes or the smell of a mother's neck, but falling in love with Rinoa had softened the granite of his disposition, if only slightly. He didn't know that that was necessarily a good thing.

Squall straightened once more, and the strange creaking repeated itself.

He tipped his gaze slowly, apprehensively toward the ceiling, his heart in his throat even before he saw Cid.

Hanging limply from the ceiling fan that whirled in lazy circles overhead, he blinked down at Garden's commander, the eyes owlishly large behind the glasses. As Squall watched in horror, those glasses gradually slid down the beak of his nose, and burst with a sharp tinkle at his feet, the sound almost musical in contrast to the gruesome scene.

The cord he'd used to hang himself dug into the thick neck, a purple line through rolls of flesh.

Squall, accustomed to violence and by now well hardened to it, felt his gorge rise, a corrosive splash of bile in the mouth, a terrible poison that ate through his tongue and stole the power of speech from him. With a quiet cry of horror, he launched himself up onto the desk just as the fan gave an ominous creak, and the entire thing collapsed with a terrific crash.

He scrambled through the wreckage toward the large man, giving just one experimental tug at the rope--actually several articles of clothing tied together into a sturdy line, Squall saw now--before realizing that it had dug far too deep into Cid's throat for even desperate hands to pull it away. He spun toward the desk and flung a drawer open, skittering his hands through useless junk before he located a pair of scissors as the clock on the wall ticked away the final moments of Cid Kramer, recorded in the annals of the room's respectful silence with ragged, whistling breaths.

It was a miracle his neck hadn't broken. As it was, he might still be too late.

He sawed and hacked through stubborn threads anyway, careful to keep the blades from Cid's throat.

Forever passed before the last clinging strands parted, gaping open around the discolored flesh and allowing a gigantic, involuntary gasp through lips that flapped like the frantic gills of a fish washed ashore.

"Sir, can you hear me?" Squall asked, crouching beside him, the scissors clattering beside one of his feet. He didn't know whether Garden's headmaster even registered the words, the mouth still opening and closing silently. He couldn't hear anything over the rush of blood in his ears and the drumming cadence of his heartbeat, a throbbing like heavy machinery. Maybe he was actually speaking, and Squall's mind was too numbed to accept the words.

He lifted Cid's heavy frame off the floor and slung him over one shoulder, bolting for the door out into the hall beyond, smashing the button of the lift frantically under a shaking palm.

* * *

Squall Leonhart's Office

Balamb Garden

He was sitting at his desk watching Rinoa doze in a chair near the door, wondering how she could sleep like that with her neck craned at such an awkward angle, twirling a pencil idly between his fingers, when the phone hidden behind a massive heap of paperwork buzzed. Again.

Sighing, Squall snatched it up before the noise could disturb his sleeping girlfriend. "Yeah. Leonhart."

"Squa--I mean, um…Commander, your da-um…the President of Esthar's here to see you."

He closed his eyes in agitation. _Perfect. _Just what he needed--Laguna's bumbling attempts at fatherhood when he had so many more pressing matters to consider. He didn't bother asking the timid secretary to send him away--she was new, and nervous enough as it was without Squall expecting her to refuse admittance to important politicians. Never mind that Laguna, with his informal clothes and easy smile, was hardly your average elected official wearing their immaculately pressed suit and façade of compassion.

"Fine." he said in a clipped tone, hanging up.

The door opened a few moments later, and his father strode in--devoid of any bodyguards or the usual entourage most presidents insisted on--clad in a loose shirt and equally loose khakis, hands shoved deep into his pockets, graying ponytail slung casually over one shoulder. The blue of his top matched the concerned twinkle of the eyes Squall had obviously inherited, creased now at the corners with faint age lines.

Squall clambered to his feet as Rinoa stirred, then sank back into the dead sleep which had held her in its iron grip for most of the afternoon. He stood formally as Laguna walked toward him, the open light in the man's eyes faltering a little, dimming toward hesitation as he took in his son's reserved stance.

"Squall."

"Laguna." the young man returned, linking his hands behind his back, face impassive.

"Wish you wouldn't call me that." Esthar's president replied, scratching awkwardly at the back of his neck. He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands, the large palms fidgetting uncertainly for a moment--a movement echoed in the anxious twitch of one leg--before he jammed them back into his pockets once more.

Squall relented slightly, the shoulders dipping a little from their rigid line. Maybe the guy wasn't all that great at the whole fathering thing--actually, when you came right down to it he was pretty much shit at it--but at least he made the effort. That was more than a lot of fathers did, Squall knew. How many of the students at Garden had simply been dumped off and left for good? How many rambling letters home, full of false cheer and painful hope, went unanswered?

"I came by to check on you, considering…well, considering."

"I'm busy."

"I know, I just thought…you're still new at all this, you know. It's a lot of responsibility for one person, especially someone so young. I thought maybe you could benefit from a little help from your old dad."

It was almost endearing, in a bumbling-doofus-accidentally-saves-the-world type of way. Squall felt the walls of ice he constructed for moments such as these melt, just slightly, dissolving beneath the warmth of Laguna's awkward smile. Nevertheless, he didn't want any help. And what good could Laguna's presence do anyway? It wouldn't magically restore Cid's good health and peace of mind, nor would it vanish the badgering calls and constant, nagging worry that flayed away at his soul. The acid coils of razor wire that dragged like rusted nails through Squall's mind would not disperse just because of the tentative curve of those lips.

"I'm handling things just fine."

"I'm sure you are, Squall." Laguna hastened to reply. "Didn't mean to imply you were…incompetent or anything, I mean, I know you're not, it's just…geez, I'm bad at this." He smiled again, a little self-mockingly this time. "I thought you should know, I have some people looking into finding Quistis. I thought Esthar's resources might come in handy." _And I knew you'd never ask for help _hung in the air between them, unspoken but understood by both.

Squall picked up his pencil again, fingers tightening around the slender shaft of wood until it creaked stressfully.

The sound reminded him of the ceiling fan, straining with Cid's deadweight, emitting that same warning groan, barbed hooks of memory that snatched at his sanity.

"How's Cid? I heard what happened."

"Dr. Kadowaki says he'll live. He won't suffer any brain damage, and after a few days of rest in the infirmary he should be back on his feet again." His body, however, wasn't the most fragile part of him, Squall thought grimly. It was his mind that needed protection from harm, not the physical visage that wrapped it in the soft flesh of a man logging too many hours behind his desk. It was the mind that had driven him to so drastic an action, the mind that had fallen so deep into despair that it couldn't fathom moving forward in the face of tragedy.

"Good. Frickin' awful what happened to Edea." he said softly, a pained line drawing itself between his eyebrows. He might have been thinking of his own dead wife and the tortured agony of loss to which he could relate all too well.

Squall, embarrassed at the emotion that crossed his father's face, retreated back behind his desk and scribbled a few notes across the most recent report he'd received.

"And how are you doing, Squall?" the troubled question dragged his gaze back up once more. Laguna aimed what Squall had come to think of as the 'father look' at him, that expression that held equal parts affection and distress which never failed to make him uncomfortable. He still wasn't used to this man with his strangely unofficial ways and clumsy attempts at offering advice on women--Unraveling the Female Mind 101 as Laguna liked to call it, a course he'd thoroughly flunked himself, if Squall remembered correctly.

"Fine."

It was a lie they both detected immediately; the shadows smudged beneath and inside his eyes revealed the falsehood, slapping it naked and squirming onto the desk between them.

"All right." Laguna responded, as though he'd swallowed the fib, removing his hands from his pockets and reaching slowly, almost shyly across the desk to set them on Squall's shoulders. "But you know that you can ask me for anything you need in a second. Any of…this," He flapped one hand to encompass the mess of paperwork almost completely concealing polished wood. "that we can take care of, we'll do it, I promise. I want this to stop as much as you do, you know."

Squall nodded. He did know. Whatever else could be said about Laguna, he genuinely cared about people, and he knew that Quistis in particular, with the intelligence shining bright in those blue eyes and her passionate need to assist others in bettering themselves, had integrated herself into his heart. The worry sketched into gray-blue eyes did not gleam solely for Squall, the young man acknowledged.

"I saw the ring on her finger." his father continued after a moment, flicking a glance back toward the still slumbering Rinoa. "Congratulations."

In a rare moment of participation in the forced father/son bonding sessions, Squall had revealed his plan to propose to the raven-haired sorceress, but in the pandemonium that took place over the next couple of weeks, he never had gotten around to telling the man her answer.

A fatherly pride glowed in the gentle irises, momentarily softening his concern.

"Thanks."

"Hope you did a better job than I did with your mom." Laguna shook his head disparagingly, his smile a bittersweet shadow that froze the lips for a long moment.

He sometimes wished he could remember his mother. He prided himself on his aloof emotions and ability to distance himself, but still he couldn't always exile the dull ache that occasionally nibbled at his stomach, that vague longing of _home _that burned in the soul of even the most cold-hearted. Especially now with Matron gone. Though he hadn't really acknowledged her as his mother--too many bad memories to overcome, secret rancor that burned inside of him, because it had been she that made Seifer into what he was today, and she that begged for his freedom-- Squall had still caught that faint sense of home embedded in her very skin. It smelled distantly of cookies, and the softest violets, reminding him of salty breezes, and miniature versions of his friends playing on a sunny beach.

"You know, when I proposed to Raine, I didn't even say anything. I tried to, it just wouldn't come out right. So finally I just took her hand and stuck it on her finger." His eyes looked hazy, distant. Squall felt a pang inside his chest; he always experienced it during those rare moments Laguna talked about his mother. For so long he'd considered himself to be alone in the world, without family or even friends, really, that the realization that he'd once had a home, a loving family, a mother who fondly brushed his hair and whispered magnificent stories as she tucked him into bed, still hit him low in the stomach.

"I hope you two will be happy."

Involuntarily, Squall glanced toward Rinoa, focusing on the drip of her black hair over the chair's arm, the pale skin visible under the sleek ebony waterfall, the rosy part of full lips. He felt his face soften, the way it always did whenever he looked at her. It still amazed him that she could love someone like him; it seemed as absurd to him as a flower falling in love with a rock.

"We will…dad." Squall replied quietly, because looking at Rinoa reminded him of her various scoldings and lectures on addressing his father properly. And, because, as much as he hated to admit it, the pleased smile that lit Laguna's kind features chased away the awful chill of the entire situation. Like warm honey poured into his veins, sticky sweet, a smooth comfort through the unease that simmered inside him.

The phone droned annoyingly again, interrupting the moment.

Squall sighed heavily and rubbed a hand across his scar, the motion furious for a moment before he reined in his frustration.

"I see you've got too much on your plate for me to hang around pestering you. Just remember what I said? You'll…let me help you?"

Honestly, he'd rather cut out his tongue and serve it to Rinoa for dinner, feeding her across a candlelit table the same way couples did in those sappy movies she loved to watch then actually ask for anyone's assistance. But he knew it would get rid of Laguna faster and allow him to return to his duties that much sooner if he didn't reply negatively, so he just gruffly said "I'll be in touch," and then picked up the phone.

His father let himself quietly out, sparing a warm smile for his son's sleeping fiancé on his way into the hall.

* * *

Sleep slid with the ease of escaping silk through the desperate clench of his mind that night, and even the soothingly constant whisper of Rinoa's breathing failed to loosen his muscles.

On his back in the narrow bed beside the young woman, Squall peered blankly up onto the ceiling. He counted each groove and imperfection his eyes stumbled across, until the intense scrutiny gave him a headache, and even then he kept going, because it distracted him from much worse thoughts. Moonlight slanted through the blinds on his window, silver rods that fell like prison bars across her face. In one corner, his gun blade and jacket glowed with the same illumination, rimmed in a pristine gray that lent them an otherworldly radiance.

He could see his eyes, narrow and accusing, reflected in the weapon's shiny blade.

He wondered if slumber evaded Cid as well, if he stared at a similar ceiling with hungry desperation, as though cracked ceiling tiles might inject sense into his world once more. Or maybe he pictured himself in those ceiling tiles, saw himself standing with sleeves rolled to the elbow and pale wrists laid bare to a razor's edge that glinted the same color as the moonlight.

Squall saw it even if Cid did not, watching long streamers of red dripping down the headmaster's arms. The rivers forked down the lengths of flesh, winding tributaries that stained the white shirt in cherry-black splotches.

He squeezed his eyes shut on the image.

Dr. Kadowaki had promised to keep an eye on him, and he'd gotten a similar pledge from the doctor's new assistant, a red-head somewhere around his age named Bria Jaycen. Cid wouldn't do anymore damage to himself under their watchful gazes. Still, he couldn't help the worry that twisted his guts around themselves in a hopeless snarl, and the restless need to do _something _hummed alertly beneath his skin.

Eventually, Squall gave up on falling asleep. It just wasn't happening tonight.

He rolled himself carefully into sitting position, cautious not to wake the young woman beside him. Hyne knew she needed rest, after crying her eyes out for days right after Edea's death, and then again when Squall's horrible discovery came out, her heartbroken sobs haunting him for nights. He wished he could leech that pain from her and undertake the burden himself, even if the addition of so many extra worries broke him beneath their massive weight.

Gently, he brushed hair from her eyes, and leaned across to kiss her lightly on the forehead. Cool to the touch, her skin tingled his lips, and he left the room with the taste of her still on his mouth.

Night transformed Garden, usually so familiar and calming a sight--it was home, after all, as much as he'd ever known anything to be--into a foreign landscape of shadows and alien shapes. The boots he'd slipped his feet into without tying right before creeping out into the hall flapped briskly, tongues dangling between loose bootstrings. He shivered against the cool fingers scratching chill grooves down his spine, and paused next to a patch of flowers growing along the walkway for a moment, inhaling their scent.

He didn't know where he was going. He needed to get away--he acknowledged that, but beyond a requirement for change, for fresh air in his lungs and the night breeze stinging his eyes, Squall didn't know what he sought. Hyne knew he couldn't return to his office; even with the work probably still mounting at this late hour, he just couldn't force himself into that stifling space any longer. The soldier in him thirsted for action, for the ring of steel and the harsh tune of bullets singing inharmonious duets over his head. He needed _something _besides paperwork and harassing phone calls and students who brought every little concern to him, important or not.

Squall thought longingly of empty roads, of squealing tires and blasting music.

He had the authority to check out any of Garden's vehicles that he wanted, though he doubted that power had been intended for midnight drives along curving streets to satisfy the hollow unhappiness caused by inaction. Still, if it preserved some small measure of his sanity, Squall thought it might be worth it. In all honesty, who would even notice, or quite frankly, care? Xu, probably, but he could handle her. He'd listened in stony silence to her rants before, usually following them up with a cold "Are we done yet?" that never failed to piss her off. The confrontational young woman might give him a good piece of her mind, but he still outranked her.

He slid with the stealth of a shadow into the main building and made his way quietly toward the garage. He still marveled at the absolute stillness of the halls, even though he'd crossed through them many nights after staying late once again to finish up some report or vital administrative task that kept the military academy running smoothly. As a student, he'd never seen them so motionless, and the sight struck him as somewhat eerie. The silence carried imagined noises of creaking ropes and the heavy swing of bodies through his ears, the pendulum of a swaying shadow crisscrossing the floor in front of him for a moment.

Cid's glasses fell again, broke again, and he could see agitated purple skin in the bruised heliotrope of the silhouettes scattered throughout the main circle of classes and dorm rooms. Squall paused, shaking his head to clear it, flinging the thoughts free as a dog sheds water from his coat.

He ran into Bria outside the infirmary as he swung by for a quick peek, just to set his mind at rest. She collided with him in a flurry of strawberry blonde and dropped papers, which promptly fanned out across the tiles underfoot.

"Oh crap, sorry! Didn't see you there." she whispered.

He helped her gather them back up in silence. She didn't seem intimidated by him, as many students and even some staff were; most would have squeaked a brief thank-you and then scurried off, glad to be out of his presence before he brought some of the stern discipline in his eyes down on them. Instead, Bria smiled gratefully at him, and drafted a brief summary of Cid's condition.

"He's doing ok. He was awake when I left; hasn't said anything to either me or Dr. Kadowaki, but that's not really all that surprising. We haven't tried to push him. You shouldn't either."

He was almost mildly amused at the tone of demand in her voice. No one ever tried to order him around.

"Dr. Kadowaki's planning on putting him on some anti-depressants. I just wish we'd noticed something before things went this far. Hopefully the medication will help; honestly, sometimes it does, sometimes it makes things worse. He'll need someone to keep an eye on him until we're sure he's not going to try anything else."

"I'll take care of it." Squall promised. "…Thanks." He felt odd saying it. "For staying with him."

"I like Cid." Bria replied honestly. "I think it's a damn shame something like this had to happen. I just hope they catch the bastard who did that to his wife. I've never met her; only been here about a month or so now, but if he loved her that much, she had to be something special despite what happened during the war."

_Did that mean by the same stretch of logic, that Seifer, clearly doted on by Edea, wasn't nearly as bad as most would make him out to be, simply because he'd earned her love and affection despite his difficult personality? _Squall didn't think that really counted, considering it had been Seifer's hand that cut her down if you believed the hysterical reports trickling in about the ex-knight's 'murder spree.'

He noticed she hadn't said 'I hope they catch that bastard Seifer Almasy,' and found that interesting. "You don't think Seifer did it?"

"Hmm?" she looked up, halfway through the act of rifling through a small bag he hadn't noticed earlier. One slim shoulder lifted in a shrug. "I don't, actually. I know people talk a lot of shit about him, and I've run into him a couple of times before--almost literally, the guy doesn't really care who he pushes aside if they're in his way--but he strikes me as more of the…petty bully type. Not a psycho who engages in a murdering bloodbath across the continent."

He'd struck Squall the same way. But that was the danger of ambition; it wrapped its chokehold around even those most thought would amount to little more than a collasal failure who found their worth in the bottom of a bottle, and dug deep with poisoned claws. It had been Edea's hands that strangled Seifer from mere bully to power-mad tyrant, the one with insanity in his eyes who wanted the world at his feet. If not for that fateful trip to Timber's TV station, he might have ended up as a bartender somewhere, expelled from Garden because he simply would not bend to their rules, bitter and filled with self-loathing.

Or, Squall recognized grudgingly of his rival, he could have been something great. There was intelligence even behind the madness, shrewdness that served him well on the battlefield, and in a fair fight Squall didn't honestly know who would win between the two of them. If he'd yielded some of his obstinacy, if he'd compromised enough to gain SeeD status instead of always making up his own rules as he went along, Seifer might have actually gone on to make something of himself. In fact, despite his initial conviction that Seifer had murdered those teens in Timber and kidnapped Quistis, probably even killed her as well, he now found himself digging deeper into that theory, wondering if he hadn't let his anger and his sour sense of competition toward the young man cloud his judgement. He'd slipped through the proverbial noose once already, and in spite of Squall's dislike for the ex-knight, he had to acknowledge that Seifer wasn't dumb enough to risk such a public display of violence sure to land him in front of the firing squad this time. His was an execution even Quistis' patient, reasonable arguments couldn't save him from now.

Unless the seeds planted by Edea, or rather Ulticimea, had grown roots so deep he couldn't pluck them free, and he'd simply snapped.

"You know what I mean, don't you?" Bria asked, tapping one foot thoughtfully against the shiny floor. "Maybe I'm completely wrong--being touched by that much magic couldn't have left him undamaged, and maybe his mind just couldn't take it anymore. But I watched his trials, and I think Instructor Trepe made a lot of good points. Everything I've heard about her makes her out to be an astute, smart person. I guess it might just be hard for me to think she was so wrong about him."

That was another thing that nagged him; Quistis had a good sense for people, and he couldn't quite bring himself to think she'd mis-judged Seifer so badly either. But everyone made mistakes, and sometimes those errors had to be paid dearly for.

He only prayed Quistis wasn't paying for her own mistakes right now.

"Yeah." Squall replied briefly.

Bria didn't seem put off by his brusque attitude; she'd heard plenty about it, and consequently didn't take it personally. "It's late Commander; I'm heading off to bed. Dr. Kadowaki's still with him; you can go and see him, if you like." She stuck her hand out for his, then a snatch of memory flowed to her on a weary strand of thought, reminding the young woman of Squall's aversion to touch from anyone but those closest to him. She retracted the offered fingers, smiled tiredly, then walked off into the dim lights of Garden's sleeping halls.

He watched her go, because he could think of nothing better to do.

He was not sure he wanted to see Cid; a part of him did, but another piece--the darkness in everyone that whispers self-doubts and uncertainties to ears that can't help but listen--froze his entire body. What did you say to a man who couldn't stand the grief skulking through his heart anymore, a fractured soul who is little more than a cadaver dragging themselves through the motions everyday? Squall couldn't even handle Rinoa's mood swings during her time of the month. What could someone like him possibly say in a situation such as this? Where did he even begin? With a sober question, wondering aloud how Cid could have possibly done such a thing? Could anyone really put into words the kind of darkness that persuaded a man to hang himself in his own office, while his soldiers, his children, ambled past in blissful ignorance?

Squall stood with fists clenched at his sides for several long minutes, staring at the infirmary's softly illuminated entrance.

He couldn't stop the images that flickered like hazy cinema through his brain, flecked at the corners by spatters of black thought, dust spots on a filmstrip.

_-The resigned defeat visible in the lines of Cid's body, his feet not even kicking in natural struggle-_

_-Blank eyes, dead and yet not, probing his own-_

_-The pale fish belly white of thick hands, grazing his cheek as he flung the headmaster's body up over his shoulder, the touch punching an icy fist through to his heart and pulverizing it in fingers of the coldest winter-_

Eventually, the sights drove him away from that doorway. He hurried in the direction of the garage once more, practically running as ghosts pursued his heels, the purple-black of night distorting into bruised flesh again.

* * *

Forest

Outskirts of Wendigo Village

Quistis shivered in the chill of early morning, and pumped the well's rusted handle twice, receiving a weak trickle of water for her troubles.

Sighing, her arm worked up and down more enthusiastically this time, spurred on by the cool air tightening in around her, corroded metal squeaking its noisy protest. The next gush blasted from the faucet, hitting her square in the chest and stumbling her backward a little with surprise and the force of the spray, her feet slipping in soil dampened to slick mud.

She cursed as she lost her balance in the ankle-deep oil of it, and crimson embarrasment splashed across her cheeks to brush color into the pale face. She was surrounded only by miles of forest and the occasional songbird flitting through wiry branches, but still she couldn't help but recognize the indignity of flailing around like this while stark naked. It made her feel vulnerable with those looming green sentinels closing in on all sides, hiding their secrets away in teeming branches as she stood completely exposed.

She ducked beneath the fountain of water, ready for it this time, liquid plunging splinters of ice into her shoulders and down her spine. Quickly, the young woman scrubbed a tiny dollop of shampoo through the clumped sections of her hair, grinding the pads of her fingers briskly into her scalp. She wished she could dig into her mind just as easily and rip out the kernels of horror that nested there, breaking the fertile loam of normal thoughts with maggot-like roots. Tendrils of memories, incomplete in the places where she chopped them abruptly off, snapped through her, firing Quistis' veins and squeezing her chest.

Quistis saw blood, so much of it, splattering in a grisly peacock's tail of scarlet across surrounding walls, saw Seifer's face, pale in contrast to the black sea around him, and then…nothing.

A soldier compartmentalized pain. A soldier locked agony--physical or mental-- away into a corner of the mind preserved for just such an emotion, and then threw away the key. It was a survival technique of war, a desperate necessity, because if one focused on the torment of a blown-off limb, or the terror of a comrade lying in pieces across a meadow that ran red with the gore of a thousand others, the mind simply seized up, like a piston frozen with grime.

She'd dutifully thrown away that key, but somehow it felt like a sick betrayal of Matron. She felt disgusting and cowardly for trying to evict the memories of her death, when she'd died for Quistis.

Her gaze focused on the mud squelching up between her toes, blurred by the imperfect lenses of her eyes, smudging white flesh and brown sludge together, until she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

The sight was an oddly familiar one, representative of her entire existence. Life and death; one ended where the other began, the two spiraling around and around one another, two serpents determined to devour the other's tail.

A soldier's life, and death, were both often brutal, brief things, Quistis mused, but mothers had never been a part of that equation. They were separate from the carnage, from the blood staining the hands and pooling beneath the fingernails, the only safe haven in the worst of storms.

The water beating her shoulders felt a million times warmer than the ice of her reminiscences. Matron's face fused with Seifer's scowling features, the strange union of expressions melting together into a single entity, the ex-knight's angry eyes flaring above her gentle lips, her tinkling laughter slicing through the bizarre apparition.

The laughter turned sharp, caustic, cutting into Quistis' mind like the talons of a bird of prey.

_-Ulticimea, her booming laughter compressing around them, bursting the ear drums-_

She slipped again, losing her grip on the well handle and plunging to one knee.

A flock of birds exploded from the trees behind her, and the suddenness of that noise in the forest's solitude sent Quistis scrambling for her whip, lying on top of the clothes she'd folded neatly nearby.

She clutched it to her chest while they winged by overhead, heart stuttering erratically beneath both hands.

"Pull yourself together, Trepe." she ordered herself sternly, letting go of Save the Queen with fingers that trembled. Getting a bit shakily back to her feet, Quistis slogged back over to the well's spout, and ducked beneath it as she worked the handle once more to wash the final traces of soap from her hair. The steel of the slender metal tube poking up from the ground flickered hazily in front of her eyes, and not for the first time in the last few weeks, she lamented the loss of her glasses. She carried a pair of contacts with her for just such an emergency, though she hated wearing the Hyne-damned things, but those, too, had been left behind, still in her bag back at Matron's orphanage.

She wasn't blind without them, but close enough to it, seeing only colorful smears that only vaguely suggested people or obstacles. After a while, she'd started to become accustomed to viewing the world in varying degrees of blurred silhouettes, memorizing the positions of certain things to make life a bit easier. Until, of course, Seifer began playing tricks on her, moving things around to purposefully confuse her, then watching and snickering from a few feet away while she groped in vain for them, and then, just as futilely, tried to hit him.

Behind her, the run-down shack which had become her and Seifer's sanctuary--an abandoned hovel which must have at one point contained a hermit with an aversion to modern plumbing--pointed a ramshackle, gnarled finger of a roof toward the sky. Several shingles hung in dissaray from its mottled sides, marching along the battered home like the decaying rot of ill-maintained teeth, snapped off at the root.

Taking up residence inside of it with Seifer, of all people, felt strange to Quistis, almost as though she were attempting to build a life with him. A small piece of a broken, scattered family, two sections from the same jigsaw puzzle that didn't fit together.

Yet she found even his incessant, overbearing presence preferable to isolation, to the hollow chill of loneliness that even now flogged the mind and thrust venomous tendrils into her heart. Alone, Quistis was not sure her brain could have survived intact; sanity was a precious, tricky thing, easily ruptured, the splintered shards of it nearly impossible to piece back together again. _Though if anyone were experienced in that type of thing, it would be Seifer._

She squeezed water from her hair. Speaking of Seifer, she needed to hurry, before he ambled back into the clearing in time to ogle Quistis standing there missing far more than just her glasses.. He'd shouted something to her earlier about chopping firewood, and then slammed the door behind him, so hard the entire shack jolted on its foundation. Used to those types of exits, she'd barely even flinched.

It was almost like he wanted acknowledgement that he was leaving, as though the thought of simply disappearing didn't sit well with him. He'd always sought attention, bullying it out of people with all the finesse of a train wreck. She'd noticed his tendency for boisterous entrances and exits even while he was still a student, a look-at-me demand that arrested the concentration no matter how hard one tried to ignore him. _Maybe, after the childhood he had, he just needs people to recognize him. Maybe he's just as afraid of being alone as the rest of us. _

Or maybe he simply did it to be annoying.

He stood just within the clearing's entrance, roughly-hacked logs slung over one shoulder. The ancient rust of the axe he'd used to obtain them flaked off onto the collar of Seifer's shirt from the tool's position across his other shoulder, falling unnoticed to his collarbone..

Wreathed in a halo of green-laced sunlight, the forest changing the spear of light into an emerald prism that caressed the flesh of her back, Quistis glowed with a pearly luminescence. He watched jeweled little fingers of light flicker across the toned muscles of her legs, jade fireflies that speckled the body and snagged in her hair. The blonde strands formed a waterfall of golden wheat over her shoulders, darkened from its usual flaxen shine by her primitive shower.

He'd been watching her for some time now, emerging from the woods just in time to see her pants slither down her legs, followed a moment later by the navy-blue panties. Being the considerate person that he was, of course, Seifer had neglected to announce his presence so she could peacefully continue her bathing, taking the opportunity to admire the view while Quistis obliviously soaped her breasts in slow, sensous circles, like some kind of damn porn star.

He knew the teasing motion of her hands wasn't purposeful; if she'd known her former student stood only a few feet away gaping like some Hyne-damned little virgin accidentally stumbling on an issue of Balamb Girls Gone Wild, Seifer wagered he'd find himself walking away carrying a few bleeding stripes courtesy of Save the Queen, Quistis' near-blindness notwithstanding. But holy shit; he'd known Quistis had a natural sort of sensuality about her despite the bookworm exterior, but this…The woman oozed a vulnerable kind of sexuality despite her obvious discomfort, a reluctant sexiness that he found far more enticing than the overt sluttiness of the women he'd slept with.

Seifer heard his breath rattling more harshly in his throat, and scowled at himself. _For fuck's sake; it's Trepe. Quit acting like you've never seen a naked woman before. _

He felt pissed she'd managed to elicit such a reaction from him, and consequently Seifer found it necessary to screw with her a bit.

Smirking, the young man dumped both logs and axe in a heap by his feet and stepped easily over the stack, striding confidently toward Quistis as she walked carefully toward her clothing. He crouched next to the folded pile, swept up her panties in one hand, and helpfully held them out to her.

She jerked away with an un-Quistis like yelp as her fingers grazed his, turning bright red, his name tumbling from her lips just an octave below a level audible only to dogs. "_Seifer_! How long have you been standing there?" she demanded furiously, vehemently ripping her underwear from his hands and trying to cover herself with the skimpy scrap of material.

His laughter circled her. "Come on, Instructor, don't be so uptight. I just thought you might want some help dressing since you can't see very well. Can't a former student give his teacher a little assistance? You were the one who always used to bitch about how I had to make everything difficult."

"Give me my clothes _this instant_, Seifer Almasy." Quistis hissed, giving up on trying to conceal everything and holding the underwear awkwardly below her stomach. Her breasts bobbed hypnotically with the force of her breathing.

He crossed his arms and stood up. "Or you'll what?" he asked, moving closer. "_Glare _me to death? You really kind of lose the authority without those glasses, you know that? It's like seeing you naked." His infuriating smirk flashed again as he deliberately roamed his gaze up and down her body.

"Give me my clothing." A steely edge hummed along the razor bite of her words.

He smiled and kept coming, crowding her, reverting back to the harassing teen she remembered from Garden, threatening other students for their lunch money when he got bored and beating up the occasional freshman who became too irritating. She clutched her panties more firmly, nails digging deep into the waistband, crumpling the silky material like rose petals gripped too hard in an ungentle palm.

"Seifer, I would appreciate it if you would hand over my clothes." She spoke through gritted teeth.

_Always so damn polite. _

He picked up the remainder of her outfit and waved it in front of her face; he knew she could at least pick out the blur of it arking past, that knowledge confirmed when she lunged suddenly toward him as it rippled by, slipping in the mud and crashing straight into his chest. The laughter bubbling from his throat cut off midway through as two wet, very nude breasts abruptly smashed up against him.

They both froze. He could feel Quistis' heart slamming erratically against her breastbone, as though it were trying to make some daring escape through her skin and into him. He felt the heartbeat in his own chest, matching the stumbling rhythm of his own as they stood gawking in numb shock at one another, his face smearing into obscurity before her unfocused eyes.

Well, fuck. For a prude, she had awfully nice breasts. He'd never noticed them that much before, (all right, he'd taken the mandatory leer at them a few times, although that had mostly been just to piss her off,) but he was finding that with them shoved right up against him, and braless no less, he was very much so enjoying them. Or at least certain parts of him were enjoying them.

He could see humiliated scarlet crawling its way through her cheeks once more.

Seifer peeled his tongue from the roof of his mouth. _Trepe _was supposed to be the flustered one here, not him. He sneered at her. "Those are nice, Instructor. You should wear lower necklines. Give the Trepies something to jerk off to."

He never seen those eyes drill with such icy malice into anyone before, and her rage unclogged the last of the surprise from Seifer's throat, clearing the way for another rude laugh. "I guess with Puberty Boy out of the running, those are still available to the rest of us."

His laughter slid like knives through her ears, grating and jagged. He brushed past her to retrieve the axe and wood, then thundered his way as noisily as ever into the weathered shack, the door slamming with a resonating crack behind him.

"Hyne _dammit_." Quistis swore, rooting around in the mud for her clothes. Forget any tenuous connection she might have felt to him during her most vulnerable moments following Matron's death; he was still, and would always remain, a gargantuan asshole.

* * *

Classroom B34

Trabia Garden

Hayden Garth slouched moodily in his seat, ignoring his teacher and staring instead at the pencil he tapped in a steady drumbeat against the surface of his desk. Distantly, he heard the man's voice, sliding through the ear canals like insects through a densely flowering meadow, a constant and cacophonous buzz that built inside the brain. He felt it like the vague pressure of an oncoming headache, an annoying half-distraction.

"Hey. Psst." A finger jabbed him in the left shoulder.

He ignored it, concentrating on the up and down motion of his pencil.

"Hayden. Hayden, man!"

"Fuck off." he mumbled out one corner of his mouth.

"Dude, I need the answer for number three on last night's assignment."

He saw a dark head leaning across the aisle in his peripheral vision, and rolled his eyes. Jace Keeling, of course; he bet the lazy little shit hadn't done an ounce of actual work since joining Garden. He was like a damn parasite, feeding off everyone around him without contributing anything back. He hoped they kicked him out soon. "I said 'fuck off.'" he hissed.

"Come on, Garth, don't be an ass. Just help me out, ok? Instructor Darben's going to give me janitorial duties if I don't turn in this next assignment complete."

Frankly, Hayden didn't see how that was a bad thing. Maybe scrubbing shit from the men's toilets would give the idiot time to reflect on the fact that maybe, just maybe, he should do his own work instead of slacking off and relying on others.

"Come on!" his tone shrilled into whining territory, and Hayden stifled the urge to deck him. Once, he might have, but these days every little movement seemed to cost him far more than it should have, each action a torpid effort, like a man treading molasses. He could remember feeling like that ever since Timber, ever since he'd stumbled from that smoking ruin and onto the corpses of his companions, laid neatly out in an orderly row, like china dolls lining a storefront window. It was funny, Hayden recalled, how…blasé they appeared. Excluding the gaping destruction of the wounds which had killed them, they appeared not unlike the bored students around him, just attempting to get through one more class period without falling asleep. He'd expected…mouths flopped wide in silenced screams of horror. He'd expected the final moments of their death etched into staring eyes, recorded there with the same clarity as the words blurring across the pages of his textbook.

He hadn't expected such awful blankness. It reminded him of staring into a dark room, expecting your eyesight to adjust eventually, waiting forever for the shadowed outline of furniture to register as faint outlines across the retinas. And in the end, the eyes never adjusted, the pupils never picked up on variants of shadow, and the gaze simply found…nothing.

A shiver dragged its way across his spine.

He shut out Jace's incessant whispering for another minute or so, until at last the dismissal bell hummed outside in the hall, and he vacated his desk without even bothering to grab his books.

He left Jace behind, trailing after him still babbling pleas, and pushed his way into the hall as it filled with chattering students.

This was the moment he felt most trapped, with voices swelling around him and spilling over into the thoughts that crowded his mind. Garden's halls teemed at moments such as these, when the classroom portion of each cadet's day finished and the afternoon opened up for lunch and combat training. He could feel the expectant tautness in the air, an excitement that was never present first thing in the morning.

He didn't share any of it, because he knew they were watching him.

Sweat crept with lazy, wintry strokes down his back, icy trails that dove beneath the waistband of his pants.

They'd watched him since he'd returned from Timber. He imagined their eyes on him now, stabbing through the shoulder blades with ruthless intensity, needle pricks of awareness that tingled through his whole body.

Hayden never could catch them, no matter how fast he turned, no matter how many dark corners he probed with panicked eyes. Sometimes the focus he felt narrowing in on him seemed to radiate from the walls themselves, from inside his own head, pushing against the front of his brain, compressing it into the skull. He couldn't stop the sensations, no matter how hard he tried. They slithered into his dreams, tainting them with strange voices and laughter, until he took to spending his nocturnal hours in the library, trying to stuff his brain full of enough information to drown the whispers.

Maybe he was just fucking nuts.

He walked briskly to his dorm room, navigating the halls with just enough hostility in his stance to keep others from bothering him. He hadn't possessed that unreceptive edge before; maybe he'd picked it up from that asshole Seifer Almasy. Guy fucking beamed it from his pores, shots from a laser cannon that blasted straight through the skin.

_Kind of ungrateful thoughts about the guy who saved your ass. _

He ran into his roommate in the hall outside their dorm, dressed in training gear and carrying a bulky pistol in one hand. He scowled ferociously at Hayden and stalked past him without a word, the expression on his face dropping Hayden's stomach into his boots.

Crap. Gaid looked like he wanted to rip Hayden's intestines out through his asshole, which meant--he swung the door open and stopped in its frame. Yep. Hyne fucking _dammit._

A mass of dark curls, ringlets that spilled like peels of chocolate across his bedcover, glinted at him under the room's lights, framing dusky skin and feline gray eyes. The long legs, stretching for what seemed to be miles beyond the short skirt, fanned lazily in the air, kicked nonchalantly back and forth while she read one of his magazines.

He sighed. He didn't need this, not today. "Look, Llela, I told you not to just invite yourself in. You think maybe you could start respecting my privacy?"

She didn't look up from her reading. "Gaid let me in. It's his room too." One eye rolled casually in his direction, peeking up through wispy bangs. The lips curved, triumphantly, as though she could sense the annoyance that boiled beneath the surface of his skin. She probably could, come to think of it. The pinched set of his mouth and dark cast to the eyes didn't exactly hide his irritation.

He shut the door hard behind him, resigned to his fate. Most of the male populace at Trabia Garden would have killed to be in his position, alone in a bedroom with Llela Baud aiming seductive looks from beneath mascara-enhanced lashes; it was why Gaid had tried to explode his head with the force of his glare. Frankly, his roommate could have her, or anyone else willing to take the young woman off his hands. She was physically attractive, certainly, but honestly he found her annoying as hell. She was too pushy, too cocky, and far too nosy.

"What'd you look at this time?" Hayden demanded. "My underwear drawer? The pictures of my dad I keep in the closet? You know, I used to keep a journal when I was about ten. Why don't you read that?"

"You're rude." she said calmly, stretching luxuriously and tossing the magazine aside.

"I'm _tired_. I haven't slept in a long time." he snapped.

"Touchy touchy. I'll help you relax." Llela suggested in a sultry purr.

"No. Get out."

She shrugged. "Fine. Guess you're not interested in the latest on Garden's 'disappearances.'"

"Hey, guess what, you might not remember this, but looking into that almost got me killed, and _did_ wipe out four of my friends. I'm done with that."

"That was just because you guys happened to get mixed up with Seifer Almasy. Guy's a lunatic."

"I keep telling people, it wasn't him. Somebody else did it."

The uniformed shoulders lifted again. "Headmaster Riley doesn't seem to think so. One of the instructors sent me to his office the other day, and I walked in on the middle of a tirade to B. Garden about how they needed to clean uip this mess and take care of their 'murdering little bastard of a student' I think was how he put it."

"So? I've already tried telling him. He won't listen. There's nothing else I can do. Almasy got away with killing Hyne knows how many people during the war, and they pardoned him. He'll probably get out of this too."

"You sound kind of bitter."

"Never mind. I told you to get out of my room."

"I think you're going to find this interesting, though." She smiled again, secrets tucked away in the smug curve of the cherry blush of her lips. "I started doing some research of my own after you got back, mostly because I was bored, and conspiracy theories are always interesting. I found something I think you'll want to see."

"Well I don't." Hayden replied testily. "I want you to go away and leave me alone."

She sat upright on his bed, crossed her legs at the ankle, and swung them nonchalantly back and forth. "But you know I won't. And even if you are a little bit rude, I know you won't pick me up and literally throw me out of here. Chivalry, or something like that."

"It's called stupidity."

"Meet me at 0 900 in the training center, all right? Just you, of course. I promise I won't take advantage of you."

"Good_bye_." he said pointedly, opening the door for her as she slowly rose to her feet, arching her back with deliberate languor.

"Just show up, ok Hayden? I think you'll find it worth your time."

* * *

Squall Leonhart's Office

Balamb Garden

He stood behind his desk with hands clasped tightly at his back, injecting his most perfected glare into each of their heads.

Irvine at least had the grace to look slightly ashamed. Selphie, though decidedly less perky than normal considering the grim atmosphere around Garden these days, didn't appear particularly apologetic. And Zell…Zell slumped in the chair Rinoa habitually used for napping, swinging his feet spastically back and forth, like a damn child hyped on sugar. Didn't he ever sit _still _for Hyne's sake?

"You were identified in Timber's police station. _Naked_. Can you explain to me exactly how three of Garden's SeeD's--trained mercenaries who are supposed to consider themselves examples of the superior army Cid has taken years to build--ended up _naked _inside a sabotaged police station?"

It was one of the longest sentence any of them had ever heard him speak.

Zell, predictably, broke the silence first. "We didn't sabotage anything! I mean, it's not like we were signing our names on the walls or something--"

"You broke a window to get in. Were you just trying to air the place out or something?" he demanded sarcastically.

Wowee, Leonhart was pissed. Good thing he hadn't used those firecrackers after all.

"Hey, man, I covered up--I swear. I put my T-shirt over my face. They shouldn't a' known it was me!"

"You didn't cover up well enough, then. One of them saw part of a tattoo sticking up over the top of the shirt, and also described another tattoo on the left ass cheek reading 'Mikey Was Here.'"

"Mikey's love for you _does _kind of give you away, Dincht." Irvine added helpfully.

Selphie looked with interest at her blonde friend. "You have a tattoo on your butt that says 'Mikey Was Here?'"

He flushed vibrantly. "Hey, I was really drunk, ok? Give me a break."

A stagnant pause hung in the air. "Um…can I see it?"

"_No_!" Squall hissed, sinking down in his chair and dropping his forehead onto his palm. _Hyne, like I didn't already have enough to deal with…_

"I do want to point out, Squall…Commander," Irvine amended, noting his friend's thunderous look. He wasn't their buddy at this moment, but their superior, and one that appeared dangerously close to taking his gun blade to Irvine and Zell's testicles at any moment. "That only Dincht here was naked. Coulda' been worse, you know." he drawled.

_How? How could it be any worse? Cid's still lying in the infirmary because he tried to commit suicide, Seifer's off on a tour through the countryside hacking up kids and former sorceresses, Quistis is presumably his captive or dead, and Timber's never going to allow us back in a million years._

"Yeah, I mean, originally I wanted to use firecrackers for a distraction. The station could have blown up or something."

Squall hissed a furious, drawn-out sigh and shook his head helplessly, still cradling it in his hands. "Just get out of here, all right? I've got work to do. I have to try and repair relations with Timber, on top of everything else."

"See what happens when you just whip it out like that, Dincht?" Irvine hissed out the corner of his mouth.

"Aw shut up." the martial artist snapped back as they all turned to leave, Selphie flouncing through the exit first, followed by her grumbling boyfriend, who yanked the brim of his hat grouchily down over both eyes. Zell just barely squeaked past the shutting door as his friend banged it closed, almost smashing him against the frame in the process. He darted safely into the hall beyond, the tempestuousness of his quick temper simmering into rage. "Hey! You did that on purpose!"

"Let it go, Dincht. Maybe your fat head was jest too big to fit through the door."

Zell leapt for the taller man in a flying tackle.

The two fell with a terrific crash into a nearby wall, a flailing, cursing knot of limbs that rolled wildly down the shiny floor back the way they'd come, until Irvine's boots slammed with a resonating thud into the door of Squall's office.

When Squall opened the door to see what had caused the commotion, he found both young man still thrashing around like unruly children with Selphie crouching next to them scolding in a voice that seemed unused to the sharp tone. He stared at the entire mess for a moment, then simply closed the door once more.

He returned a moment or so later, gripping his gun blade tightly in one hand, the polished weapon capturing the hall's light against it in starbursts of illumination that hurt the eyes.

He waited patiently for them to roll past once more, then struck, with all the grace and precision of a pouncing wildcat, stabbing the deadly point into Zell's pants leg as it sailed by. The martial artist's movement jerked to an abrupt halt, resumed only after a loud ripping sound as his pants parted ways with his limb. "Hey, what the hell?"

Selphie seemed particularly interested in the exposed patch of flesh, and kneeled behind him craning her head at odd angles, presumably in an effort to see beneath his torn clothing and catch a glimpse of the tattoo lurking somewhere below.

"What'd you do that for, man?" Zell demanded, hopping to his feet, tension and fury visible in every taut line of his body. He shook with the force of pent-up anger, coiled tight like a spring preparing to explode at any moment.

Squall jabbed his gun blade through his belt with more force than he'd intended to use. "Go back to you dorm rooms and stay there. And if I hear of any of you even _breathing _wrong within the next twenty-four hours, I'm going to court martial you all." he snapped, and then spun and stomped back into his office without another word.

Irvine clambered to his feet, wiping blood from his mouth and glaring at Zell. "Nice goin,' Dincht."

"You tried to slam me in the door!" the blonde yelled, cheeks splashed in throbbing patches of red, like superficial burns that pulsed and blistered on the flesh.

"You were the one who got us into this in the first place!"

"Hey man, this was all your girlfriend's idea! Why don't you yell at her?" He clenched his hands into hard fists.

"I just wanted to help Quisty! We had to do _something_."

"It probably would have worked if you and Zell Jr. hadn't made your grand debut in front of Timber's best and brightest, Dincht. For Hyne's sake, who ain't gonna' complain about _that_?"

Zell growled and looked perilously close to charging him again. Seeing this, Selphie grabbed her boyfriend by the arm and jerked him away, hauling him along with surprising strength away from the strain of the situation. "Come on Irvy. We'll talk to him when he's not being a butthead." She cast one final look over her shoulder at the short young man, and stuck her tongue out at him.

"Yeah, real mature!" Zell hollered. "I hope someone ate all your candy while you were gone!"

They vanished around the corner, and with a muttered curse, he whirled and kicked the wall, cursing again at the pain caused by such an action and hopping around one-footed until finally the agony in his toes dulled to only a distant ache.

* * *

Ninety-seven…Ninety-eight…Ninety-nine…One hundred. The fluffy animal leapt primply over the wooden gate, and dashed off into the black recesses of his mind.

Zell turned onto his side, sighing as he snuggled his face deep into the pillow Ma Dincht had crafted especially for him, worried about his ability to sleep in such a utilitarian place as a military academy. He'd started out counting naked Seifers flapping around in a spasmodic nude chicken dance, but while that had cheered him up, it didn't exactly coax him toward the oblivion of slumber. Next he'd tried actually _reading_, and something aside from an edition of Timber Maniacs or Balamb Girls Gone Wild, at that. Usually that put him right to sleep on the rare occasions he suffered from insomnia. This time, however, he just couldn't concentrate long enough to digest even a few words from the manual that he'd eventually chucked in disgust across his room--a particularly excruciating booklet on GF's and their origins. Honestly, did anyone aside from Quistis actually _enjoy _reading that crap?

_Aw, man. _That had been precisely the purpose of those painfully boring few minutes spent trying to wrap his mind around theories on the creation of Ifrit; to forget all the worries that crowded full-force back into his brain now. He felt them rapping against the front of his skull, with the persistence of a late-night visitor caught in a rainstorm pounding away at a closed door. Like vines of ivy coiling in a helix of leaves around a house's brick exterior, they strangled all other thoughts, refusing them entrance until Zell could feel his concerns fleeing down his throat to disperse through the rest of his body.

He knew he'd acted extremely unprofessionally, both in Timber and during his confrontation with Irvine. He regretted that; he just had so much apprehension slumbering under his skin that sometimes he imagined himself bursting at the seams, and when he finally couldn't hold it back anymore, it exploded from him in dangerous ways. It was bad enough worrying over Quistis, but to hear that Matron was dead and that her husband had attempted to follow her completely floored him. They'd abandoned their search for their friend and the traitor right away, rushing back to Garden and just leaving the loose strings of their investigation dangling.

His stomach grumbled accusingly.

Zell wrapped his arms around it, trying to ignore the hunger pangs shooting through his gut. With the way he'd been screwing things up lately, he'd probably only manage to blow up the cafeteria or something if he snuck down for a late-night snack. And knowing his luck, they'd be out of hot dogs anyway.

_Wait! _He burst to his feet in a sudden lightning strike of memory. Hope burning in his heart, Zell dove across his room and began rummaging frantically through the piles of clothes and empty ice cream cartons until he finally dug deep enough to unearth the pair of pants he'd worn that disastrous day in Timber. He shoved a hand into one pocket, groping desperately, then moved on to the other one. And…yep, there it was. The hot dog he'd stored there what seemed ages ago now. It plopped into his hand, dried-out and withered, but a _hot dog_; sure, it was three weeks old, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

Conveniently forgetting the consequences of the last time he'd decided to eat something off his floor, Zell dug in.

He shoved the whole thing into his mouth, swallowing it almost without chewing.

The taste took a moment to hit him, but when it did, assaulting the taste buds and turning his stomach upside down, he gagged and lurched to his feet, running for the bathroom. _Ahhh! Ahhh! It was _moldy_!_

He crammed his head under the sink's faucet and turned it on full blast, sucking mouthfuls of water that failed to clean away the memory of spoiled food and stale bread.

He emerged back into his room sputtering and wiping the back of his mouth a few moments later, flopping across his bed to retrieve the pack of gum stored under his pillow. The pack only had a few pieces missing from it, so he took the remainder and stuffed them all in his mouth.

The sheep began jumping through his brain once more as he lay back down, but after what he was already beginning to think of as The Hot Dog Incident, Zell found himself more wide awake then ever, and eventually gave up on the animals helping him into sleep.

He flipped onto his stomach, tapping his fingers against his chin.

Even if he hadn't been confined to his room by Squall's orders, there wasn't much to do at this hour of the night. Everything closed down at ten except for the Training Center, which remained open all hours of the day for those insomniacs who craved a little monster killing to wear them out enough to sleep.

He contemplated doing just that. A little grat bashing never hurt anyone (grats excluded, of course,) and it just might burn off all this excess energy coursing through him. However, there was a good chance either Squall or Irvine might have the same idea as him, and he didn't really want to run into either one right now. He still wasn't entirely convinced his testicles were safe from Squall's gun blade, and Irvine could kill from over a mile away. One zigzagging blonde ducking behind a few plants didn't really stand much of a chance.

If only that little fuck Almasy were here. He could think of a few interesting things he could do with the guy. He'd show Seifer exactly how _Chicken Wuss _he could be, Zell thought with a scowl. Or…couldn't be, he guessed. Well, anyway, he'd show Seifer just what it felt like to _be _a Chicken Wuss. Not that he was alluding to the fact that he already knew and wanted Seifer to feel the same as he did.

Zell scratched his head, a little confused by the circle of his thoughts. He rolled off his bed and zipped across the room toward his closet, only tripping a few times on the way. Maybe he really should think about tidying the place up…

Nah. Who was going to see it aside from him? He didn't have a girlfriend, and most of his friends were far too scared of being eaten by something prowling under all his dirty laundry to set foot inside. He rather liked it this way; with everything out in plain sight like this, he could usually see whatever he wanted right away. No time wasted rummaging through drawers and under the bed. Hell, even _he _was too scared to find out what sort of life forms had matured beneath there.

He yanked open the door to his closet and started idly going through it, tossing various objects over his shoulders, most of them broken or in various states of decomposition. He came up with a tennis shoe in one hand that appeared gnawed on at one corner, the frayed rubber puzzling Zell for a moment. When the hell had that happened? Hyne, he hadn't gotten _that _hungry one day, had he?

The shoe sailed back over his shoulder, taking out the lamp on his nighstand with a loud crash.

"Aw, shit!"

A heavy fist pounded on the wall of the room to the left of his. "You want to shut the hell up? Some of us are trying to sleep."

"Hey, mind your own business!" Zell yelled back. Asshole. The guy had actually shown up at his door before to complain when Zell flipped on his music and cranked up a particularly lively song, the kind that pumped the blood full of adrenaline and practically demanded furious dancing. He really hadn't crashed into the wall _that _many times, and it was a crime to play The Hyne Head Smashers at a decibal below ear-shattering. Sure, it had been 2:30 in the morning; Zell understood that, but the guy didn't _own _Garden for Hyne's sake, and he really didn't see any need for threatening to stick a CD up someone's ass.

Although looking back, giving him that atomic wedgie had probably been a mistake…

Something black and square landed in his palm, tumbling off the shelf overhead and nearly striking him in the head. "The hell's this?" he muttered, turning it over in his hand. Its identity snapped into his mind a moment later, tumblers slipping into place with a triumphant click. "Hey! No way! My radio!"

He carried it over to the bed, avoiding pieces of smashed lamp, shards of its base winking at him from under the clothing strewn across his floor. He'd clean that up later…probably.

Zell examined the piece of equipment in his palm. It was an odd-looking amalgamation of pieces he'd scrounged here and there, from the mechanics who overlooked Garden's vehicles, from the infirmary, and even from Irvine's phone, the reason for its sudden failure to this day still confounding the cowboy. Bulky and awkward-looking, it was too large for him to fit his fingers all the way around, but when he flicked the switch on its side, Zell was rewarded with the sudden crackle and pop of static.

His next revelation nearly made him drop the thing.

"Holy fucking Hyne!" the young man whooped, ignoring another round of hammering blows from his neighbor.

He'd given Quistis the other half of the device.

It picked up signals from Garden's sattelite system and bounced them back, allowing the user to either access the main radio frequency, or communicate on a private channel open only between the radio Zell clutched now, and another device also crafted by him. He'd disguised it--pretty ingeniously, if he did say so himself--as a metal pin, the kind that people clipped to the front of a uniform or blouse. That had been difficult, to construct something that could receive and transmit, all contained within something as inconspicuous as a shirt decoration. But it worked, after a lot of tweaking, and he presented it to Quistis the night of one of Selphie's numerous parties, so she could lead him through the process of asking one of the newer SeeD cadets out without actually being present herself. He distinctly remembered her rolling her eyes but smiling, as usual, at his antics, and fastening it onto the hair clip she always wore.

The hair clip, he felt sure, she had most likely been wearing when she departed B. Garden with Seifer. He couldn't remember seeing her that morning, since they'd probably left long before he was awake, but she rarely wore her hair down, so chances were it was with her now, wherever she might be.

Excitedly, he punched his thumb down on the transmitter button, and bellowed her name into it, louder than he'd meant to. "Quistis! Quis, can you hear me? Quis, it's Zell!"

He sat in the inky darkness that comes only with true night, and watched her sleep.

He found himself doing that a lot lately, and while the act disgusted him slightly, because it seemed to Seifer something straight out of a sappy movie, or worse--something Puberty Boy might do--he couldn't seem to stop himself. Maybe because he really had nothing better to do to as he awaited sunrise and the flush of light that somehow made sleep tolerable. The blackest parts of evening, like the ebony well that drowned the senses now, hid too many memories, too many bad dreams that he couldn't escape. He'd taken to dozing fitfully during the day while Quistis puttered about smacking into things and swearing quietly, keeping him amused while he drifted through that in-between sleep that was neither real unconsciousness nor true awareness.

It was the only way he could achieve semi-peaceful rest.

As the moon crawled its way toward its zenith, hanging like a clouded pearl in the sky, Quistis turned with a whimper on the cot which had smelled like mold and unwashed bodies until they'd dragged it outside to air. Seifer didn't mind letting her have it--personally he thought it still smelled like a damn old person too senile to remember to bathe regularly. He knew he shouldn't exactly complain about their lodgings, because this was better than most of their options--namely, the streets--but fucking Hyne, did it have to _reek _so badly?

At least he couldn't smell peaches anymore. It irritated him that the scent of her hair haunted him like that, burned like a brand into his olfactory memory until it became almost a grounding sensation that he could latch onto when he felt most in danger of floating off into Ulticemea's web.

Seifer paced the creaking floorboards, slashing Hyperion lazily in front of him a few times.

He counted his steps, concentrating on the mindless monotony of his back and forth motion to keep the demons at bay.

He'd just hit one hundred when suddenly a voice hissed into the dark shack, one that dropped him into defensive position, Hyperion glittering wickedly in the scant light sieved through the dusty window. Heart thundering, he circled warily, keeping himself between Quistis and the only entrance, trying to figure out where the hell it had come from.

The voice repeated, louder this time, sounding closer.

"Quistis! Quistis, it's me! Are you there? Come on; Hyne, answer me!"

Seifer lowered his gun blade in confusion. The fuck? That had sounded like…Chicken Wuss. How was that even possible?

Trust that annoying little shit to irritate him from half a world away.

"The fuck is that coming from?" Seifer snarled quietly, tracking the fizzing murmur of static toward Quistis' sleeping form, eventually narrowing it down to the battered little table next to her, holding the bottle of shampoo and bar of soap the previous owner had left behind in a wreath of spider webs. Beside them sat a nondescript gray hair clip, the one she'd worn her hair twisted into when they left B. Garden, crackling now with sporadic hisses of static, and Zell's whiny voice.

He leaned Hyperion against the wall, and picked it up in one hand.

"Quistis! Quis! Quis! Quis!"

He remembered her hair streaming loose around her in the ocean, remembered its tickling strands slithering along his arms to embrace him…

Seifer looked at her hair, fanned dry and golden across the cot beneath her like a fallen sun, and shuddered.

He flipped the clip over in his palm, examining it closely, trying to figure out how the hell it was speaking to him in Chicken Wuss' pathetic little tone. Seifer recalled it gleaming like dull metal in the sands he stumbled through with Quistis' deadweight hanging from his arms, washed up beside one of her boots, which he hadn't even noticed she'd lost until he almost tripped over it. He took them both; at the time he hadn't really known why, because in the grand scheme of things, how important was a damn hair clip? It wouldn't help them survive or heal Quistis' grief.

Maybe it had simply been shock. Or maybe, he didn't like the way she looked with her hair down; maybe he preferred the pinned-back look of the instructor, the primness of the teacher he'd enjoyed tormenting to the loose-locked vulnerability of a stranger who brushed too closely along his deepest fears and regrets.

"QUIS-TIS!"

The shout roused the sleeping young woman. She came awake with a startled gasp, lips parting violently around the exhalation.

"Your hair clip is fuckin' _talking _to me."

She raised both eyebrows, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

"Don't look at me like that; I'm not fucking crazy, I swear to Hyne. The thing keeps jabbering at me in Chicken Wussian."

Quistis looked mildly amused at that. "Chicken Wussian?"

Seifer shrugged and shoved the thing into her hands. "I refuse to believe that he speaks the same language as the rest of us. Would you tell him to shut the hell up, or turn it off or something? I'm this close to catching a train back to Garden just to shove it up his fucking ass."

She ignored his last threat, staring in confusion at the object in her hand as it came to life once more, spitting Zell's pleas into the otherwise quiet shack. "Quis, come on, pick up please! Come on, Quis! You gotta' be there!"

_How in the…Oh Hyne! _the young woman thought, tempted to smack herself in the head. The pin he'd created that she'd snapped onto her hair clip months ago; she'd completely forgotten about it. All this time, she'd had a way to directly contact someone she trusted, and she'd never even thought of using it. Actually, it was a miracle it still worked after the dousing of seawater it had received. Apparently, Zell possessed talents beyond throwing punches and eating hot dogs.

She held down the small needle meant to latch onto material and brought it to her lips.

"I'm here, Zell. Can you hear me?"

A long hiss of static, punctuated by several noisy pops. "Quis? Fucking Hyne, you're alive!" Relief bled thickly into his words. "We told Squall you were out there somewhere; Almassy didn't hurt you, did he? I swear to Hyne, if the creepy bastard laid a hand on you I'm gonna' track him down and--"

"I'm fine, Zell. We're both safe."

"Too bad. About Almassy, I mean, not you. Kinda' hoping something ate him by now."

"Likewise, Chicken Wuss."

"Where'd you take Quistis, you ass-eating little numb fuck bastard?"

"From behind, like a man."

She glared at him. "Could we please leave vulgarity out of this?"

"Almassy doesn't know how to do anything that isn't vulgar."

"That's a big word for you, isn't it, Chicken Wuss? Need me to get you a dictionary to look it up or something?"

"Hey man, fuck you!"

"Both of you, knock it off!" Quistis scolded, sounding very much the agitated teacher again despite her missing glasses. "Zell, what's happening at Garden? Is everyone all right?"

A long pause proceeded his next words. "Quis, you need to get back here. Everything's gone to shit."

Her heart thudded into her feet. With effort, she dragged it back up, struggling to rein in the wayward emotions that thundered out of her control. She waited until she had completely composed herself before speaking again. "What do you mean? What's wrong?"

"Cid tried to hang himself after Matron died. And Squall's buried under all kinds of shit because of that little prick, and Rinoa's not doing so well."

"Not doing well." Quistis repeated thickly. "Is she ill?"

"Well, not really. I mean, I guess technically there's nothing wrong with her. She just sleeps a lot, and she won't talk very much. Just really depressed, I guess. You showing up would do a lot for her."

Quistis sighed quietly. "I can't do that, Zell. Seifer would be prosecuted."

"So?" her friend exploded. "Let 'em shoot him! It's what he deserves."

"No it isn't." she explained patiently. "I've been with Seifer this entire time, Zell. He didn't kill those teenagers in Timber, and he certainly didn't murder Matron. Galbadian soldiers killed her, and probably the teens as well. I'm not going to let him hang for crimes he didn't commit."

"I'm touched Trepe." Seifer interrupted dryly, leaning one broad shoulder against the wall behind him.

Zell's answering sigh echoed noisily. "Yeah, I know. Selphie, Irvine and me already did some investigating into the whole Timber thing; some old lady saw the whole thing. It was one of Galbadia's soldiers--and funny thing was, the old lady turned up dead right after she told us about watching the murder."

"So someone is trying to frame him." Quistis said grimly.

"Looks like it. But come on, Quisty; he shoulda' gotten the firing squad a long time ago for all the shit he's pulled; bring him back to face the music."

"Zell!"

"Aww, come on Chicken Wuss, let's just kiss and make up already."

"Hey, shut up!"

"Did you go to some kind of special Chicken Wuss school for all those clever comebacks?"

"Seifer!" Quistis warned. "Stop provoking him. I'm not in the mood to play referee to a couple of immature children."

"Hey, Quis, don't blame me; Almassy started it."

"Yes, well, you haven't exactly helped the situation."

"Look, Quis, I got an idea. Bring Almassy back, ok? We'll sneak him into Garden right under everyone's noses. Promise, cross my heart, I won't tell Squall or anyone else. It'll give you guys a place to stay again instead of runnin' all around the place getting blamed every time someone can't take a shit. Just for you, though, not Almassy."

She rolled her eyes at his graceful imagery. The thought of home sent a resonating twinge through her chest, razors that shredded the heart and throat. What she wouldn't give to be back at Garden, relaxing with a good book and a nice hot cup of tea.

Then, glancing at her moody companion, Quistis remembered just what she would be giving up: Seifer's life. And she couldn't do that, much as he might get on her nerves at times. He wasn't going to be punished unjustly.

"Zell, you know I can't do that. There's the problem of getting back to Garden in the first place, and then hiding Seifer once we're actually there. How are we supposed to sneak him in without anyone at all noticing, and where in Hyne are we going to put him? Under my bed?"

"Still here, thanks." Seifer put in sarcastically, giving a little wave.

"I said I'll help ya', Quis."

"Yes, well I appreciate that, but you're…"

"Stupid?" Seifer offered helpfully.

"I'm gonna' stick my foot up your ass, Almassy!" Zell growled.

"Stop it." Quistis cut in before the fight could progress any father. "No, I was only going to point out that you aren't the most…_subtle _person I know, Zell. This would be a stealth mission."

"Pffft. Whaddaya mean, Quis? I'm as subtle as-"

"A car crash." Seifer intervened. "A stampeding herd of snow leopards."

"Quisty, stuff something in his mouth, would ya'? His voice makes me throw up in my mouth."

"Hey, with any luck you'll choke on it, Chicken Wuss."

"Seifer Almasy, Zell Dincht! Be quiet!"

"Yep. The detention voice." Seifer commented, rubbing his nails casually on the front of his shirt.

"Look, I think we can pull it off, Quis. And are they actually going to think to look right under their noses for Almassy? They're gonna' be combin' the country for him, maybe hassling Squall a little bit, but you really think they're going to search B. Garden? They're not going to go through every classroom and dorm room and the library and parking garage and the training center and the infirmary and Cid and Squall's office and the third floor balcony and the basement and-"

"Zell." Quistis interrupted patiently. "I understand your point."

"Anyway, comes down to this, Quis; they're government. They're not gonna' be that thorough. 'Sides, after a while things will start to die down."

"And in the meantime, what do we do? Keep him hidden, sneak some food to him, and go about our lives?"

"Why not?"

"Then what the hell am I supposed to do? Jerk off to your porn while you're gone, Chicken Wuss?" Seifer snapped. "I'm not a damn pet. I'm not going to lay around in your room all day waiting for you to come home and feed me, like a fucking dog."

"No way! He's not stayin' with me, Quisty! I meant like, you could take him in or something."

She sighed again, aching for her home and her classroom and her friends, torn between honor and the niggling sense of _need _that ripped her apart from the inside. She took a quick glance over at Seifer, and to her surprise, saw him watching her speculatively, eyes dark and contemplative.

Quistis pulled her attention back to her conversation with her friend. "Forget it, Zell. It's too risky. We need to clear Seifer somehow before we come back home."

"Do it." the ex-knight said abruptly, shoving himself off the wall and picking up Hyperion.

Startled, she twisted to look at him. "What?" _How could he make such a complete one-eighty from a couple of moments ago, when he was complaining about not being Zell's pet? _

"What'd he say?" Zell asked through a sizzle of static.

"I said let's do it, Chicken Wuss. I'm getting fucking tired of not having a decent shower anyway, and staying in places that smell like old people."

Quistis took her finger off the transmitter. "Seifer, it's extremely risky. There's no guarantee we can get into Garden without being observed, and you were right. You'd have to stay cooped up in one of our rooms for an indefinite amount of time, until we can prove your innocence."

He waved her concern off. "Getting into Garden is easy. I used to sneak out all the time. Trust me, no one's going to see us."

Why didn't that surprise her?

She bit her lip in thought for a long moment, a strand of hair falling over one eye.

"Quis? Quisty? You still there?"

Keeping her gaze locked on Seifer's, Quistis brought the pin back to her mouth. "All right, Zell. Let's give it a try. As long as I have your word that you won't try to kill, dismember, or otherwise harm Seifer."

"Yes!" His exuberant whoop nearly broke her ear drums. "You got it, Quisty! On my honor as a Dincht! 'Kay, now let's start figuring out how to get you guys here…" 


	11. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

Cid Kramer's Office

Balamb Garden

He sat staring at his palms as the clock on the wall behind him ushered evening in with deafening, strident clicks of the minute hand.

It was all he could do lately.

Time still passed after Edea's murder; he could feel it pressing down on him, massive deadweight on the limbs, but he could no longer achieve anything worthwhile in the wasted moments of his life. Every breath was a challenge, every heartbeat a struggle he just barely surmounted.

In his entire existence, Cid Kramer had never known such desolation. It was the kind of misery that burned the soul and scorched the veins, inviting a darkness into the heart that pried with oily fingers at the fragile splinters of his sanity.

Regret hung in his stomach, a hot stone against the guts.

"Sir?" Squall prompted in his usual brusque tone, standing at attention in front of the headmaster's desk. His voice was blandly cold and to-the point as usual, but when Cid finally tore his weary gaze away from the thick fingers, he saw something that might have been sympathy flickering across the youthful face.

His tongue worked slowly, hesitantly, almost as though he'd forgotten how to use it. Perhaps he had; he couldn't remember uttering more than a few words in the three and a half weeks since his wife's death. Grief stilled the lips and seized the throat in a terrible rigor mortis, stiff and cold like the limbs that lay six feet under. "Yes, Squall?"

Holding himself rigidly, uncomfortable with the undulations of emotion he could practically feel prickling along his skin, Squall studied Garden's headmaster through the assessing eyes of a soldier. Cid looked like he'd felt coming out of Time Compression--utterly lost and bewildered, disoriented to the point of mind-numbing fear.

He tried not to feel guilty as he pushed yet another report across a desk already stacked high with them. Honestly, he hated to do this to the guy when he already appeared on the verge of falling completely apart. In fact, Squall had never seen the man quite so…unkempt. He always had a slight dissarray about him that was, while not exactly military precise, charming at least, in the man's gently unassuming way. But now, with his shirt stained from the meager remnants of his last meal, buttoned incorrectly and coming untucked from the front of his pants, he just looked…helpless, and miserable, not at all like the leader of one of the world's most formidable fighting units. He was the vagrant in the back alley, the bundle of dirty rags too far gone from the mingled poisons of alcohol and hopelessness than ran in his veins.

However, life went on. The world did not stop rotating on its axis simply because Edea Kramer was dead., and while Squall was slowly taking over most of Garden's more hefty administrative duties, Cid was still the real power behind the academy, and no one wanted to talk to some wet-behind-the-ears kid. It pissed him off, but until Cid formally granted him full authority, he couldn't do much about it.

"Trabia Garden is still calling for updates, sir. I informed the headmaster that we're looking into all possible leads and that he will be contacted first if anything new comes to light."

"Good. Good, Squall." Cid smiled grimly, the words slow and thick in his mouth, honey that coated the tongue and adhered to the roof of his mouth. He couldn't remember such small words ever requiring so much effort before. "You're doing good."

"Timber has been…pacified." With the promise of a loan of any SeeD they so desired whenever the occasion might call for it, Squall remembered, grinding his teeth. Damn Zell and his nakedness. Nothing less would satisfy Timber's officials, and already Squall had been forced to pay up, sending a young man by the name of Brice Lengley into the small town on a 'bodyguard mission.' He was probably at this moment contemplating killing himself while he looked after some old woman's yippy little dog Poofy. The next time Zell decided to whip it out so carelessly, Squall was going to permanently fix the problem. With his gun blade.

"SeeD's Tim Ryan, Connor Akans, and Lynnesey Dom have been dispatched to Winhill to eliminate their rising monster population."

"Good. Good." Cid mumbled, staring at his hands again, with the vacant glaze of a man with nothing to lose in his eyes. "Any word on Quistis and…" His throat flexed around the next name, but the word stalled on his tongue, and he couldn't push it free.

_-Green eyes bright with madness, tinted hellish red by the flame-glow of the surrounding parade-_

"And…and _him_." Cid whispered.

"No, sir." Squall replied quietly, wishing he could say he had personally run Seifer through with his weapon, watched the ex-knight fall in pieces before his boots, bleeding the same crimson that must have stained Edea's beautiful hair. His hands clenched around helpless fury, the only tangible lifeline aside from Rinoa's love that he could clutch.

He turned to leave while the man nodded mutely and continued looking at nothing, seeing something Squall never would. Then, hesitating in the doorway, the young man craned his neck to look back over one shoulder, corroding emotion that ate away the lining of his intestines swirling its way up from the icy cauldron of his stomach. "If he shows up again, he won't make it to his trial."

The promise in his voice finally dragged Cid's gaze up to the hard lion fierceness of the gray-blue eyes.

"He was a good boy, Squall. He was a good boy." the older man whispered brokenly. "She loved him."

"The war changed him." Squall said brusquely, and then walked out.

_It had changed them all. _

* * *

Balamb Station

Balamb

"Where the hell's Chicken Wuss?" the silvery blur beside Quistis growled irritably.

She frowned in Seifer's general direction, aiming the expression at the ebony blob she assumed to be his head. Just enough lightness crested its top to suggest hair, and through the fading purple and scarlet fusion of sunset's vanishing light, she could just barely pinpoint two fiery emeralds.

"It's getting cold. I can feel my balls shrinking."

"If you're displeased with their size, I would think genetics are probably more to blame than the weather."

"Har. Fuckin' hilarious, Trepe."

She felt him press closer beside her despite his annoyance, the heat radiating from his larger frame more than welcome in the chill graze of oncoming night. She responded automatically, burrowing into his side and the coat that smelled of sweat and the faint lingering traces of the forest, and, just beneath that, him. She couldn't really identify the scent, but all the same Quistis recognized it as Seifer's own unique signature. It was the smell of his hair and his skin, a bouquet that embedded itself in the senses and refused to leave.

One of his hands brushed her knee. To her cooling skin, it felt burning hot, a not entirely unpleasant sensation.

She pulled away.

His head swiveled briefly toward her, then resumed its scan of the sleepy station from their vantage point behind a parked car that reeked of fish and cat. The tenseness of his muscles conveyed his anxiety even if he said nothing, and for a moment Quistis tried to summon words of reassurance.

She admitted defeat after less than a minute, because Seifer would never accept comfort anyway, and she didn't have quite the proficiency with offering it as Rinoa did. She was too clumsy, he too mulish.

_Better to say nothing. _

"Fuckin' hell, I swear to Hyne, if that little-" Seifer, spitting the words under his breath like sharpened daggers, suddenly broke off his tirade and shifted next to her.

A fair distance from them, Quistis spotted a mottled blur that suddenly detached from the black smudge of evening and scuttled toward them, melding into shadows for a few seconds, only to jerk spasmodically into her hazy sight once more. Beside her, Seifer muttered something that she didn't quite catch, but considering the fact that she'd distinctly picked up the word 'Chicken Wuss' uttered in his usual nasty tone, she doubted it had been complimentary.

"Is that Zell?" she whispered, placing her lips close to his ear so the words didn't carry.

"Yeah. I think." he replied, and, amazingly, broke out into a low chuckle.

The sound of his laughter made her nervous. "What is it?"

"Chicken Wuss is rolling and military crawling his way over here--I think the idiot's trying to be sneaky or some shit like that--and, fuckin' Hyne, you're going to be sorry you missed this--he's wearing a dress."

Quistis blinked and sat completely motionless for a moment, certain that her hearing was failing her now as well. "What did you just say?"

"I said Chicken Wuss is decked out like a damn woman. Wig, makeup, dress, heels, the whole deal. I don't know whether to punch him or screw him."

"I would prefer if you just settled for your usual mockery--or better yet, said nothing at all." Quistis responded wryly. _Though we both know _that's _not going to happen. _"Beating him isn't exactly going to inspire loyalty, and the romantic ambiance of the area is…lacking, to say the least."

"You mean the smell of rotten fish and cat piss isn't making you hot, Instructor?" he returned sarcastically.

"You're welcome to your own fetishes, but no, personally animal urine and decomposing trout do nothing for me."

"Maybe not, but I did hear a lot about some kinky leather bondage shit-"

He broke off into snickers as Quists swung her glare on him once more. _This is what I get for choosing a whip as my weapon. _

"Chicken Wuss!" Seifer hissed, flipping a hand signal at the young man as he scurried closer. "The hell's with the get-up? You trying to steal Squall away from Rinoa?"

"Hey, no way, man!" Quistis heard Zell snap in reply a moment later. "I'm traveling incognito." He flashed the young blonde woman an enormous grin, giving her a thumbs up that swam before her eyes. "See, I told ya' I could be stealthy, Quisty! Man, I missed ya'!" he whispered, enveloping her in a bone-crushing, breath-stealing hug that startled her. Unable to see properly, the sudden movement coupled with the feel of his false breasts squashed against her own chest disturbed Quistis.

"I missed you too, Zell." she said patiently, trying to subtly extract herself from the embrace.

"Can we hurry this little love fest the hell up?" Seifer demanded irritably. "My boys are crawling back up inside me. Pretty soon I'm going to have a vagina just like Chicken Wuss.'"

"Hey! It's not like I got surgery or something, Almassy! 'Sides, this is all part of the plan."

"Are you going to distract the Disciplinary Committee with a quickie while Quistis and I sneak past them?"

"I doubt Zell makes a pretty enough girl to entice them." Quistis cut in before another fight could brew.

"You'd be surprised, Quis." Zell said.

"Yeah--since you can't get any women, the next time Selphie throws one of her parties, you could always slip into a lacy black thong and see if Nida's free. I hear he likes his women pear-shaped. Seriously, Chicken Wuss, all those hot dogs must be going straight to your ass."

"Hey!"

"Let's just concentrate on getting into Garden unobserved." _Which means both of you will have to shut up for this next part of the trip. _Considering the non-stop flow of the banter between the two, Quistis wasn't sure they could manage that.

"No problem, Quis, just leave everything to me; I brought an extra change of clothes, right? So I'm gonna' give all this to Almassy, and we'll sneak him in dressed as a woman. I'm friends with Jonrey--he's one of the guys on the Disciplinary Committee--and I told him I was expecting a little 'company' tonight so he's gonna' look the other way."

"No fucking way!" Seifer growled.

"How are you going to explain my sudden appearance if we get caught?" Quistis asked. "You were out trolling for hookers when suddenly you just happened to stumble across long-lost wayward SeeD Quistis Trepe? That would be a little convenient."

The silence from her hyper friend indicated Zell hadn't exactly thought that part out. A few moments later, she heard the fleshy slap of his hand striking one knee and a scratch of motion in the dirt beneath them. She felt more than saw the martial artist launch himself to both feet, a wisp of soft material skittering across her face. "Wait! I got it. You were working as a prostitute, right? Because it was the only way you could escape Seifer and keep a low profile to protect yourself from the people trying to kill you. So when I picked up…ah, um…Dirty Melons, I found you too, 'cause you guys were working the same street and I recognized you."

"I'm not dressing like a fucking woman, Chicken Wuss, and there's no way in hell I'm going to prance around batting my eyes at you while you introduce me as 'Dirty Melons.' The fuck kind of hooker name is that, anyway?"

"I am _not _posing as a prostitute, Zell." Quistis bristled. "And since we're bringing me back to Garden, the whole thing would have to come out, and you'd lose several SeeD ranks, if not your entire SeeD status, for bringing a prostitute into Garden. It's not the kind of scandal Cid would take kindly to. We can't take that kind of risk."

"All right, so Almassy is my friend…Gwenda who had a little too much to drink. I'll drag him in, explain the situation to anyone who sees us, and then drop him off in your room."

"Does being a Chicken Wuss fuck with your hearing? I said I'm not putting on women's lingerie and wearing a pair of heels. And you can go _fuck _yourself if you think I'm putting that lipstick on. What color is that anyway? Chicken shit brown?"

"_No_! I borrowed it off Rinoa. She said it's 'chocolate mauve.'"

Quistis fought the urge to bury her face in her hands. "Zell, you were supposed to keep this a secret. Success hinges on as few people as possible knowing that we're sneaking Seifer back into Garden right under their noses."

"Don't worry, Quis, I didn't tell her what I was doing with it. I just asked if I could borrow some of her lipstick." He scratched his head, looking so idiotic that Seifer had to severely restrain himself to keep from bursting out in gut-busting laughter. Holy fuckin' Hyne, this was better than the time Chicken Wuss decided his fashion style wasn't 'cool' enough and had allowed himself to be persuaded, by a helpful Irvine, that dressing in baggy pants and chains, with a few teeth capped in gold for good measure, would instantly elevate his status with the ladies. Not only had he looked flat out ridiculous, he'd looped so many chains over himself that his pants couldn't take the weight and had to be clutched in one of his hands to keep from pooling around his ankles. Seifer, of course, upon coming across the spectacle, had laughed uproariously, and then, abruptly, punched Zell in the nose, prompting the martial artist to drop automatically into fighting stance with fists extended in preparation for action. He'd timed it perfectly, too, Seifer recalled, Chicken Wuss' pants rippling downward in beautiful slow motion as a dozen female cadets giggled behind their hands and Zell turned bright red while someone pointed out that his ass was hanging out of a giant hole in the back of his boxers.

It was too bad he didn't have the opportunity to catch this moment on tape.

"I'll get us back inside." he hissed when Zell opened his cosmetic-smeared mouth once more. "And I'm doing it in my own damn clothes."

"You're certain you can get us inside without being seen?" Quistis asked warily.

Seifer flicked a hand nonchalantly in the air. "Used to do it all the time. Unless Garden's patrols have changed drastically in the last couple of months, shouldn't be a problem."

Quistis turned toward Zell, lifting an eyebrow.

He shook his head enthusiastically, the garish red wig flaring out around him. "Nah.. Everything's pretty much the same. 'Cept Squall's busting his ass even more than usual, 'cause of _you_."

"He didn't ask to be framed for crimes he didn't commit." Quistis intervened coolly.

"Man, Quisty, why are you defending him all of a sudden?"

"She's thankful to me for showing her what a real man's like."

"You sayin' I'm not manly, Almassy?" Zell demanded, punching one hand into the opposite palm, scowling ferociously through heavily layered foundation and clownish circles of bright coral.

Seifer pointedly eyed the young man's outfit up and down. "I think your bra strap's escaping from the sleeve of your dress, Chicken Wuss." he replied sarcastically.

"Hey--the hell, man? I spent forever getting this just right! How the hell do women do it, Quis?"

She sighed between clenched teeth. "It's an innate talent coded into the DNA of the second x chromosome." she said dryly. "We need to get moving; we can't hang around here all night arguing. As much as I appreciate your…enthusiasm for the mission, Zell, we're going to attract the stares of anyone who happens to be out and about. If Seifer can get us inside unnoticed, I think it's best if you change."

"Yeah, you're probably right." She heard the sharp rasp of a zipper and the subsequent rustle of clothing.

"Ah fuck." Seifer snapped. "You're fucking lucky you can't see right now, Trepe."

* * *

Balamb Garden

Balamb

He guided her through the black velvet of nighttime with the light, deft brushes of a sensual dancer, touching just enough to direct without demand. Her flesh slid like marble below his own, lustrous like the snowy globe of the moon overhead, satin that whispered promises under the calluses of his fingers. Ahead of them, Zell--clad in normal garb once again, thankfully--darted through long grass toward the looming hulk of Garden, lit up like the fairytale wonderland of childhood stories.

_She _had told him those stories, the woman with the soft dark hair and equally soft brown eyes, not the witch with the callous amber gaze and blood stained lips. He smelled cookies, the beckoning scent curling in through his nostrils, a far-off taunt from the kitchen of his childhood where he perched on a wobbly stool as she fed him treats fresh out of the oven. The smell mingled with the usual ripeness of lush meadowland, drawing the young man to a halt while she proceeded cautiously onward.

Seifer stood looking up at the moon, heavy with the pearly glow that dripped across its surface from the inside, the gray density of clouds rolling like swollen leeches over it.

_-White flesh beneath his eager tongue and lips- _

_-Ruby lips thrust wide in ecstasy-_

_-Sharp nails raking his back-_

_-Furrows of pain through his skin, his mind-_

_-Bubbling laughter that hurt the ears and ate away at the soul, slithering black and twisted inside his chest-_

"Seifer?" Quistis whispered.

He craned his head to look at her, a light breeze ruffling the hair at the nape of his neck.

"Are you all right?"

_No. A fucking million times no. _

"Yeah." he replied shortly, and set off briskly once more, grabbing her by the hand on his way past and tugging her along for the ride.

Her protests about being dragged around like a small child actually slowed him a bit, until he settled into a gait her shorter legs could match without breaking into an undignified jog. For several long, silent moments they walked side by side, hand in hand, and he felt a strange calmness seeping throughout him. It was as though Quistis fed a bit of herself into him through her slender, delicate fingers, sitting like fragile glass inside his own and burning with their own inner fire. A weak man could easily find refuge in that, could so effortlessly lose himself inside her strength and determination.

Seifer thought for a moment of burrowing beneath her, wrapping Quistis around him, a second skin to smooth the original flawed one.

In the moonlight, her pretty face took on an otherworldly beauty, a goddess granted physical form and hurtled from the sky into his unworthy hands. There was gentleness there, in the patient blue eyes, obstinacy in the plump curve of the bottom lip, passion in the same gaze that snagged the moonlight and flung it toward him in a thousand shards of ice, stinging the flesh.

He felt suddenly terrified. Because walking next to him across moonlit grasses, she seemed at once powerful and terribly frail, and Seifer remembered with a sinking stomach that nothing this good ever stayed for long. Especially not in his life.

He couldn't hold on to her, because neither of them deserved that--she'd earned better, and he…well he simply hadn't.

But, perhaps, for a while he could pretend he had.

Too soon, the ex-knight caught a glimpse of Zell's blonde head zigzagging back toward them, and he dropped Quistis' hand as though she'd latched onto him with poisoned fangs. He ignored the tilt of her head and the contemplative gaze that drilled into him--still so searching and dissective despite its imperfection.

"There's a patrol just outside the main entrance." Zell hissed, bouncing on the tips of his toes.

Seifer just nodded. He'd expected that. "Yeah. There's someone there just about every night."

Quistis looked sternly at him. "How often _did _you sneak out?"

He flashed her a smile. "Just about every night."

She scowled. "That's a blatant abuse of Garden's trust and authority, Seifer."

"Uh, yeah, Trepe. Forget who you were talking to?"

Quistis sighed. "Never mind. Just get us inside. Once we're past the guards, we'll take you to my room, because I know the two of you won't last more than an hour or two without killing one another if I leave you to stay in Zell's dorm."

"Probably don't have any porn though, do you?"

"_No_ I do not own any porn; it's fake and degrading and in no way indicative of a healthy relationship."

"All right, jeez. I see all that running around the continent didn't do anything to loosen the stick in your ass."

"Just get us inside, Seifer. _Now_."

"You know, maybe that website wasn't all that far off the mark with its theories on you wanting to be the one on top-ow fuck! The hell was that for?" Seifer snarled, rubbing his aching ribs where she'd landed a bone-jarring hit. He hadn't even realized she could still target that well. _It was probably an accident. She was probably aiming for my balls. _

"Hey, guys, knock it off. The guard's going to notice something."

"Chicken Wuss, you're the _last _person to be lecturing someone on shutting the fuck up."

"Don't start!" Quistis whispered before they could get into it. Seifer alone could be infuriating enough; paired with one of his favorite victims, he instilled inside her a pure, homicidal frustration that drained all patience and ignited violence at the tips of her fingers. She clenched those fingers before she lunged and wrapped them around his throat, turning the most potent of her glares on them both. "We can't stand out here arguing all night; this is extremely unprofessional conduct. We need to get this over with as quickly as possible."

Seifer rolled his eyes. _Unprofessional conduct. Trust her to worry about something like that. _

"All right, don't crap yourself. We'll have to move fast, and quietly. We're going to circle around him to the left; use those rocks over there as cover. There's a stretch of open meadow before you reach Garden, but the grass is long enough in most places that you can crouch down and wait it out if the guy gets a little suspicious. The patrol's mostly for show anyway; some newby kid pissing his pants eager to show off his 'skills.' Half the time they're asleep. Security's mostly unnecessary, since there aren't too many people willing to break into a military academy with hundreds of well-trained and highly-armed soldiers. Only thing Garden really has to be concerned about is an attacking army." _And I already tried that. _

_-Adrenaline in the veins and on the tongue, copper and steel mingling as blood joined with the metallic rush of his triumph-_

_-The screams of battlefield, a haunting medley of ringing metal and dying shrieks-_

_-Blood on the cheekbones, under the skin, the gore of his victims a throbbing presence across Hyperion's blade, liquefied rubies beneath the fingernails-_

Zell scowled. "What about that guy who almost killed Quis?" he asked, ripping Seifer from his reverie.

"Zell." she said quietly. "Just forget about it, and let's get this over with."

"Get moving, Chicken Wuss." Seifer ordered, then, abruptly, swung Quistis up into his arms.

She flung her arms instinctively around his neck, startled by the suddenness of the motion, the heat from his body seeping through her clothing into her skin, a white-hot flame along the senses that bloomed color in both cheeks. "What are you doing?" she demanded beneath her breath.

"I said we have to move _quickly_. Your old woman shuffle is going to get us caught."

"Put me down!"

"Tch." Seifer scoffed. "Make me, Instructor." The flash of his smirk beneath the moonlight was an intoxicating thing, and Quistis found her pulse hammering with sudden erratic lurches in the side of her neck. The flutter of escaping butterflies beat heavy wings inside her stomach, carrying the sensation up into her throat and solidifying any following protest.

He glanced down into her shocked face, smiled, and took off running.

Cradling Quistis in his arms with the moon casting its thick radiance over the pores of her face and grass undulating like some magnificent green sea beneath them, Seifer ran.

It was why he snuck out nearly every night, why he slithered from the warmth of his bed into the breezy chill of nighttime Balamb. With muscles and bone working together, propelling him along as one single entity that for once felt whole and unbroken, he could remember that he was alive. The burn of breath in his lungs, the cramp of tendons ready to stop--they introduced feeling back into the hollow shell that was Seifer Almasy, into a skeleton razed down to ashes. Her laughter still followed him, but it nipped at the heels instead of spiraling through his ribcage and around the heart.

With her bouncing feather light and warm against the front of him, he felt…something more. Not just alive, but…valuable. She didn't need his protection, but he wanted to give it to her anyway.

And that gave him purpose; it took him from merely existing, to giving him a reason for drawing breath each second of the day instead of sticking a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. Because, really, what world _wouldn't _be better off without Seifer Almasy?

He dashed up behind Zell as the blonde crouched behind the boulders he'd pointed out earlier, the spikes of his hair jostling slightly in the wind.

"Ok, he's not looking." Zell whispered, stabbing his hand forward in a 'let's go' motion that for once Seifer didn't resist. Quistis clung more tightly to him as they sprinted across the field once more, the sighing grasses around them barely disturbed by the two men.

They reached Garden without the guard ever alerting, and Seifer led Zell around the side to a door marked 'Emergency Use Only,' where he finally set Quistis back on her feet. Then, uncomfortably aware of her eyes boring into him, he whipped out a small penknife and set to work on the lock.

Less than a minute later, the _snick _of his triumph swam through the air's stagnant quiet, and smirking, he swung the door open with his fingertips.

Zell, mouth hanging open, abruptly wiped the expression of awe from his face. "Hey, Almassy, frickin' hell; I tried that once. I did it for like an hour before finally giving up. How'd ya' do that?"

Seifer flicked his knife shut and dropped it back into the pocket of his coat. "I took an extracurricular course in 'Cat Burglar 101.'"

"Hey, Quistis, how come _you _didn't teach anything like that? Would have been interesting." he whispered as they crept through the entrance into eerie quiet, her hands stumbling uncertainly along the walls as the moonlight's sudden disappearence hurled her into total blindness.

"He means that he stole from people, Zell." Quistis whispered back, disapproval stiffening the words.

"Nah." Seifer hissed, rolling his eyes as Quistis tripped over one of her feet and nearly took out Zell, sliding one arm around her waist and guiding her down the hall. He refused to dwell on the emotion chewing away at his gut, the one that balked at her condemnation and forced him to alleviate her suspicions. Since when the fuck had he cared whether Trepe approved of him or not? "I never actually stole from anyone. Well, except for this one time I snatched Chicken Wuss' 'Timber's Slut of the Month' calendar from the locker room."

"Hey, that was you?" Zell snapped. He glanced quickly at the frowning young woman and flushed. "Uh, I mean…I don't have anything like that. Must have been Irvine's."

"Does Irvine write 'Property of Zell Dincht, Hands Off Or I'll Give You a Hot Dog Enema!!!' across all his shit?"

"Uh…yeah! See, Selphie saw some of his porn one time and he got in trouble, so he started writing that across everything so she'd think my stuff accidentally got mixed up with his." The young man beamed, seemingly pleased with his cleverness.

"Nice save." Quistis muttered wryly.

"Not bad for a bald-faced fucking lie." Seifer added, smirking again as Zell's eyes flashed their 'Hyne-Dammit-I-_Really_-Want-To-Hit-You-Right-Now' light. "Anyway, I learned some tricks off this guy I met in a bar. Thought they might come in handy. And they did, so you can stop busting my balls, Trepe, because without me you'd be sitting outside right now listening to Chicken Wuss jabber or trying to persuade the guard that you're the ghost of Instructor Trepe and you just wanted to drop by to go through her shit. And give it to Squall from behind."

Zell guffawed. "You know, this one time Irvine and Squall and I were out drinking, and Squall got _wasted_, I mean the guy couldn't even walk in a straight line, so Irvine and I persuaded him to go up to this burly-lookin' guy and hit on him, and he did, and it turned out the guy was into that kind of thing if you know what I mean." He choked off a bubble of laughter. "Man, good times."

Quistis swallowed a chuckle. "Zell, I was there as well, and that was you, not Squall. Irvine had to hotwire the man's motorcycle and chase the two of you through three alleyways before he finally managed to corner the man and persuade him not to kidnap you into his own personal harem."

"Wait-what?" He scratched his head. "Are you sure? I don't remem--ahhh, shit man! That guy was a lot faster than he looked! I had to climb a fire escape to get away from him, and he grabbed my foot and the whole thing started creakin' and I thought I was done for…"

"Which side of Garden is your dorm on?" Seifer whispered, his fingers brushing over the feminine swell of one hip. He saw the raspberry tint of her lips out of the corner of one eye as the hall they traversed widened out into the main circle of rooms, a rose petal slash across the marble of her features. In the soft glow of the fountain's lights, they parted like the slow unfurl of a flower opening itself to the sun's cheerful warmth.

Fuck. Why couldn't she just be ugly?

They heard the _ding _of the elevator, then the hollow resonation of footsteps and darted around the side of the fountain in unison, Seifer hauling Quistis along with him.

The shadow of Squall Leonhart flickered over polished floor tiles, proceeding ahead of the young man as he stepped from the elevator with head lowered, eyes perusing the paper he clutched in one hand. His gun blade sat at one hip, loose in its restraints and ready to cleave the limbs from an enemy at the slightest touch of its skilled master.

Seifer, struck suddenly by inspiration, let go of Quistis for a moment, placed both hands flat against Zell's back, and shoved hard.

"Hey, what the--" Zell screamed, flailing his arms around but inevitably losing his fight with gravity and falling over the fountain's lip into the glittering water with a terrific splash.

Seifer, heart thudding with both adrenaline and the faint tremor of fear that wormed through him at the sight of his rival--because he had no illusions that Squall would turn a blind eye to his presence at Garden as Zell had chosen to, not for Quistis or anyone else--grasped Quistis around the waist and tossed her easily across a shoulder this time before sliding off into the shadows.

* * *

Quistis Trepe's Dorm

Balamb Garden

He looked tired and worn-down, she observed as he draped himself across her bed.

Feeling more normal now with her eyesight restored via a back-up pair of contacts she kept in the drawer of her bathroom cupboard, Quistis watched Seifer make himself at home, his muscular frame creasing the perfect smoothness of her duvet.

She didn't have the heart, or the engery to scold him, even though he hadn't even bothered to take off his boots. Besides, studying him from where she perched in front of a lovingly worn dresser, Quistis thought he'd already dropped off into sleep, a rare occurrence that she didn't want to ruin.

Sighing, the young woman wearily bent down to take off her own boots, dropping them to the carpeted floor with light thumps that didn't inspire so much as a twitch in the sleeping ex-knight.

She liked his face like this, in repose, with the angry line softened from his brow and the fair bangs scattering across his scar with all the innocence of the escaping wisps of a child. With the sour bitterness tainting the pretty green eyes shut away and the usual scowl lost somewhere in his dreams, she could almost see the child he had once been.

Quistis slipped a hand over either knee, watching him. Then, smiling faintly, she crossed over to the bed and gently unlaced his shoes, easing the boots off to keep from disturbing him and then depositing them in the far left corner of the orderly room. His trench coat she couldn't move without awakening him, but she did carefully slide one of her pillows beneath his head, stopping to smooth an errant strand of hair from baby-soft lashes.

Her hand lingered on his face, soaking up the warmth of his skin.

_It isn't fair. _she thought suddenly, fiercely, dropping down onto the bed beside him and burying her face in both hands. They'd been crazy to attempt this, to think for even a moment that Seifer would be content to remain cooped up in her room while they continued on with their lives. The tedious monotony of the white walls would enclose him, cinching tighter and tighter until he went mad, because Seifer, if anything, needed his independence moreso than a thirsting man required the touch of fluid to revitalize his dehydrated lips.

And then they would kill him.

His execution would be a celebrated thing, ushered in with the blinding starburst of fireworks and cheering crowds. No one forgave a mass murderer twice, no matter what type of influence he'd fallen under.

Following so close on the heels of Matron's death, Quistis didn't know that she could stand such a thing. As much as Seifer infuriated her and as many times as she'd fought off the urge to kill him herself with her bare hands, she was beginning to see that beneath the swagger and the sarcasm lurked a man with a lonely streak that paralleled her own. His demons swam in his eyes when he forgot to lock them away, flickers of darkness that eclipsed the gaze like clouds across jovial sunlight.

A man with an absence of conscience or any sort of remorse, as so many people described Seifer, didn't harbor those kinds of demons.

_You had so much potential. You could have been anything, Seifer. And now you're just hunted, and hated. _

No one could function for so long with that much hatred aimed like rifle snouts at every limb, Quistis reflected. How else could one react, but to try and block it out, to forget about it any way they could? If he accepted their cruel barbs, their accusations, the dirty looks hurtled spear-like in his direction, he couldn't go on. No one could, not even a man as strong as Seifer. As it was, she wondered sometimes how he endured the weight of their collective loathing, because even the walls that he constructed weren't an entirely indestructible fortress. And that which did seep through the cracks in those walls must hurt, a more savage agony than any she'd ever experienced.

Sudden tears flooded her eyes. Furious with herself, she fought them back. She was a soldier dammit, a mercenary, and not some simpering woman who succumbed to weak and pointless crying at the first sign of difficulties.

But the emotions ripped themselves from her anyway, leaving stinging furrows in the throat. Perhaps it was the raw wound of Matron's death, still festering somewhere inside her, or the image of Seifer's beautiful head torn apart by bullets that welcomed the flow. Either way, Quistis wept brokenly as she sat there with him breathing peacefully beside her, the kind of sobs that tore themselves from a person like intestines shredded from the gut, so painful the lungs themselves whimper in pain as they struggle for air.

_What have I done? I shouldn't have brought you back here. I can't let them kill you. I _won't_,_ _Seifer._

Feeling helpless and pathetic, Quistis hunched in on herself, the tears spilling through quivering fingers where they clutched her face, as though the mere pressure of her hands might somehow hold all the misery and uncertainty inside her. Inside, she could store it away, dead bolt it safely behind the door meant to hold back such weaknesses. This openness and vulnerability was unacceptable to a woman who prided herself on her stoic control.

_I am a soldier. Death is my business. _

But _his _death curdled the heart and snapped bands of steel around her chest, until she could only gasp unevenly while the silent movie of his final moments played inside her head, their guns noiseless as they discharged into the shining gold of his hair.

He heard her begin crying, and froze.

_Aw, fuck._

This was not Seifer Almasy's department. Seducing women was a talent he had perfected, getting into their pants a precise artist's stroke of color on a canvas already stippled with flawless lines. His was a masterful touch and tongue, one that left the recipient begging for more.

But not in instances such as these. He didn't comfort; he agitated. He couldn't soothe; he was far too coarse himself. He was the splinter under the skin, not the balm that healed infected scratches.

But lying there with his eyes closed listening to Quistis sob, Seifer felt himself coming apart at the seams, as though her pain had somehow infiltrated him, pushing itself through the pores like squirming maggots. The raw agony that seemed to emanate from her resonated in the pit of his stomach, until he felt sick and bloated with its presence.

_Fucking ignore it. _he thought fiercely. If Trepe wanted to fall apart, that was her business, but she had no fucking right to try and turn him into some fucking pantywaist. He could flip over and find ignorance in the depths of the freshly-scent pillow beneath his head, bury himself in it until all else faded away.

He tried to, but somehow his body refused to turn. His limbs simply wouldn't obey; it reminded him of times when he'd drunk himself almost into oblivion, when the mind detaches and floats on its numbing layer of alcohol and no movement seems to come out quite right.

If only she would just fucking _stop_.

She was fucking killing him.

Finally Seifer couldn't stand it anymore and sat up, the rustle of his clothing announcing the shift in his position. Quistis' spine snapped rigid, the stiff set of her shoulders betraying her discomfort. She didn't look around, but he knew by the tenseness of her body that she realized he'd just witnessed her emotional breakdown.

"Something you want to talk about?" It sounded more sarcastic than he'd meant it to, and Seifer mentally cursed himself. Why bother even trying? He was only going to fuck this up worse.

"No." Quistis said coldly, and stood up. "I thought you were asleep."

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there, clasping his hands between his knees. "I was trying to, but some pansy kept sniveling and it was keeping me up."

Seifer almost slapped himself. _Shit. _He really hadn't meant to say that; he'd been right about just fucking things up worse. He knew Quistis must be beating herself up enough as it was about the moment of weakness without him adding to it, and when she turned on him with hurt and anger mingling in a cyan blaze inside her eyes, Seifer wanted to kill himself.

He stood up as she started toward him, looking as though she would very much enjoy breaking his jaw. "Come on, I didn't actually mean it like that. Fuck." He ran a hand angrily through his hair. "I'm not any good at this kind of shit, Quistis. But I couldn't just lay there with you…doing that. It was fucking tearing me up, having to hear that-"

_No. _he thought, going cold. He actually hadn't just said that, had he?

Apparently so, Seifer realized as she paused mid-step, the red eyes wide and startled, the chalky complexion bleached even milkier by shock. Fear strangled him, closing its bruising fingers around his throat and squeezing relentlessly.

How in the hell was she supposed to interpret that? _The same way he had, probably. That perhaps, as unfathomable as it was, he was starting to develop…feelings for Quistis. Something beyond the enjoyment he derived from tormenting her. _

_No. _an angry voice snarled at the back of his mind, stomping out the thought. He didn't have feelings for anyone. He was too self-absorbed, too big of an asshole. Developing a deeper relationship between himself and Quistis, or anyone for that matter, would open too many emotional channels that he had no interest in nurturing. That was a kind of hurt he didn't need to add to his burdens.

Quistis stepped forward suddenly, or perhaps he did. Afterward, Seifer would never really remember for sure who made the first move.

In the next moment he found Quistis in his arms, pressed up against him, his head dipping automatically to meet hers in a kiss that crushed the mouths and pulverized the tongues, a searching, greedy embrace full of desperation. He fell back on the bed with her straddling him, hazily realizing that she was peeling back the lapels of his trench coat and pushing the shoulders of it from his body. He lifted himself slightly so she could remove it entirely, moving his hands to her ass and grasping a handful, yanking her against him and grinding the young woman against the erection beneath his pants.

She grabbed a handful of his hair and jerked his head back, kissing him again. There was a frenzied tone to the movement of her lips, but also a hint of inexperience that suddenly iced over the raging heat of his hormones.

_Stop. _He didn't want…this to happen like this. _Then what the hell do you want? Candlelit dinners and poetry, you fucking pansy? _a voice snapped at him. _What are you, a fucking woman? _

With a huge effort of will, Seifer rolled Quistis off him, knowing that with her sliding around on him like that rational thought was pretty much impossible. "What the hell are you doing?" he gasped, taking a moment to find his voice.

Quistis scrambled off the bed as though it had turned suddenly into a writhing nest of snakes, staring hard at him through narrowed eyes still puffy from the aftermath of her weeping.

It was a look he knew well. The kind of stare that ate through to the marrow of the bones, the kind of stare he could remember receiving pretty much his whole life. _You're fucking _poison_, Seifer Almasy, _the look said. He recognized it as the expression one wears after brushing against something undeniably tainted, a miscellany of hatred and disgust that cut him right to the core.

"Why the _fuck _did you do that?" he snarled, looming over her, the angry line through his scar back in full force now, carving furious paths through his forehead. "You don't want me."

No one did.

Quistis dropped her head without saying anything, then abruptly slipped around him, disappearing into the bathroom and slamming the door behind her.

* * *

Squall Leonhart's Office

Balamb Garden

When he heard the door squeak quietly open, Squall assumed it was Zell arriving to inform him of an alien invasion of mutated hot dogs or some equally ridiculous claim. After all, his friend had given him more than enough trouble over the past few days, between disrobing in front of Timber's unfortunate police force and fighting with Irvine to flailing around in Garden's fountain at odd hours of the morning.

Consequently, he ignored the light footsteps that approached his desk, bending closer over his paperwork and trying not to let his irritation show. Whatever it was this time, someone else could Hyne well deal with it.

So when the distinctive female voice rang suddenly through his office, undeniably icy and yet somehow simultaneously radiating a sense of patience and kindness, Squall nearly fell off his chair.

"I'm back." she announced simply.

Stormy eyes snapped upward, to scan the soft curves and hesitant smile of Quistis Trepe with a blatant disbelief that seared like lightning through the gaze and flashed electrically beneath the skin.

She stood just inside the door to his office, spectacle-less but with the prim and proper updo meticulously in place, maybe a tad paler than he'd last seen her, but irrefutably alive. The wintry blue of her eyes flashed animatedly, ice shavings plunged into a roaring fire. Loose strands of hair hung to either side of her pretty features, tumbling sunlight that coiled from the sky onto the upturned faces of sun worshipers, bright with the same radiance of a summer afternoon.

"Quistis?" he replied, hesitantly, because it seemed to him that at any moment the young woman might shatter, the illusion revealed in all its falsity.

He rose almost involuntarily, coming around his desk and scrutinizing her carefully.

She clasped her hands and waited.

And finally, Quistis saw what she would have given her right arm for just a year and a half ago, the reticently beautiful smile that softened his sternness and loosened the heavy brow. It was a smile the then-smitten Quistis prayed to elicit from her lone wolf student, a smile, she reflected now, still not quite as beautiful as the one beamed from a man more similar than either wanted to admit, with his identical scar and internal struggles.

Squall fidgeted. Then, in a move weighted down with indecision and a shyness she found cute but not overwhelmingly so, he walked cautiously toward her and lightly, gingerly, wrapped both arms around her shoulders.

She hugged him gently back in return.

It felt good, wonderful even, to be held and appreciated by someone, even if she kept flashing back to a different pair of arms surrounding her body.

Even if, despite his nearness, she felt desperate loneliness carving away pieces of her soul and scattering the flakes casually at her feet, ashes tossed to an uncaring sea.

* * *

Classroom C45

Balamb Garden

The sun's rising flames scattered a phoenix tail of jeweled hues across polished glass panes, reflecting Quistis' face back at her in the tawny shades of morning. She cupped her chin in one hand, staring idly out the window while the hushed scratching of pencils wove through the otherwise still atmosphere.

She smiled faintly at the noise. She'd been back four days now, and the sensation of peace and contentment she experienced in the pit of her stomach each time she set foot inside the familiar room had yet to diminish. It sat fluid and blissful inside her, like the coffee that glimmered under the room's fluorescent lights, though not nearly so cold.

She glanced at the beverage's glassy contents, stone-cold now because she'd spent most of her time daydreaming after handing out a quiz on conduct of behavior during political events. The stagnant russett shimmered accusingly at her, an omniscient orb that read every thought scrolling through her crowded brain.

Most of them centered on a certain blonde at this very moment making himself at home in her room, probably going through her underwear drawer or flipping through her reading material just to make absolutely certain she didn't have any porn, if Quistis knew him.

And she did know him, more than she wanted to. She knew that when he slept, his face grew very soft, almost childlike, until one almost forgot the scar and the mercenary under the ratty trench coat. She knew that he'd risked his life for a boy he hadn't really known and didn't even particularly like; she knew he'd risked his life again, for her this time, back at Matron's when he could have just as easily disappeared into the sun's fading light while those soldiers terrorized Quistis and the former sorceress who'd stolen his innocence.

She also knew that the remorse so many people assumed he didn't possess swam somewhere deep inside him, buried far under insulating layers so it could not consume him. But it was an emotion not so easily contained, and she could sometimes see the strain of it around a pinched mouth and in the haunted eyes that forgot their barriers in rare moments of candor.

His image ghosted into existence inside her head at odd moments, like the whispered pledges of a lover, hot and burning and dangerous, slaughtering and maiming her feelings before slinking away once more.

It appeared now, too-vivid and distracting.

Pissed with herself, Quistis switched on her computer and tapped her fingers impatiently while she waited for it to boot up.

She hadn't dared mention what had happened between them. She still didn't know what had possessed her--or had it even been her who made the first move? She couldn't really be sure now; it all blurred together inside her head, limbs and emotions smeared together like a ruined painting. Seifer seemed to have already forgotten the entire thing, leaving her confused and irrationally angry.

_"I'm not any good at this kind of shit, Quistis. But I couldn't just lay there with you…doing that. It was fucking tearing me up, having to hear that-" _

What exactly had he meant by that? It almost sounded as though…as though he…cared about her in some miniscule way. That was really too much to wrap her mind around; Quistis knew Seifer felt deeper than many people chose to believe he did, but for her? She'd never had anyone look at her as more than a useful necessity when last night's homework had proved too difficult, or as some shining idol too precious to even interact with.

It was a lonely life as an object of worship, Quistis thought moodily. The worshippers never really loved that which they revered; they were in awe of it, and sometimes even afraid, but they couldn't give themselves fully to it because they didn't truly _know _it, in the same way her own personal fan club didn't really know her. Did they know that isolation sometimes poured itself so thickly into her veins she thought she might burst, or the way loneliness dropped its net around her and squeezed with animal strength, until she could feel the pressure itself inside her head?

No. No one knew that. Hyne, she hated to even admit it to herself.

_And there's no sense whining about it, when no one's going to fix it for you, and you wouldn't let them even if they offered. _

The screen in front of her finished loading each blinking desktop icon. Peeking quickly at her students to ensure they were all intent on their own papers and not trying to copy off a neighbor, Quistis logged onto Garden's on-line database.

Her instant message window dinged almost immediately at her.

_Someone wanting help on an assignment. _she assumed.

She clicked on the window to enlarge it.

**JacobM04: slow class, instructor?**

She recognized the faint tinge of insolence to the words, even over the computer.

_Terrific. Just what I need right now. _

Sighing, she poised one hand over her mouse, contemplating just closing out the conversation window and continuing on with a blissfully Seifer-free day.

However, no day was really Seifer-free anymore, not with him monopolizing her own personal space, hogging all the hot water in the morning and purposefully leaving his dirty socks strewn around the room just to irritate her.

Quistis sighed. _Why me?_

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Did you need something?**

**JacobM04: i see you didn't change your screen name. **

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I've had more important things to do. Again, did you need something?**

**JacobM04: nah. not really. just bored. and wanted to let you know that i'm sitting on your bed. naked. bet you're picturing it now.**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I'm picturing something, but it has nothing to do with your anatomy. Well, nothing that you'd enjoy, anyway. **

**JacobM04: if it involves that kinky whip of yours, i'd enjoy it.**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I doubt it. **

_I really, really doubt it. _

**JacobM04: come on, trepe, loosen up a little. none of your students are going to notice if you have cyber sex. here, I'll start you off: 'oh seifer, you bad boy, stop making me hot!'**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I am **_**not **_**cybering while on class time.**

**JacobM04: so later, then?**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: **_**NO!!!!!!!!**_

**JacobM04: you're way too fucking prudish for a screen name like that, you know that trepe? do i have to do all this myself? 'seifer, last night i thought about you and played with myself; then i had the naughtiest dream about us climbing in the shower together. we were all wet and steamy, and you helped me clean up, because i'm a dirty, dirty girl-'**

"Instructor?" a tentative voice asked.

Quistis jerked guiltily and slammed the conversation window closed with a panicked smash of her finger. She tried to coax back the blush that rippled through her cheeks but knew by the heat flushing her face that it appeared anyway.

She turned a composed smile on the girl, a shy first-year who couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen, and calmly rested her chin in her hands once more. "Yes, Jerriana? Did you have a question?"

"Um, on number four I'm not quite sure what you want us to write. I mean, I know you can't give me the answer obviously, but I need…"

"Clairfication?" Quistis offered, watching the instant message program blink insistently out of the corner of one eye.

"Um, yeah." the girl agreed, smiling timidly.

She spent a few moments with her student, a bright pupil and one of her favorites who easily picked up on Quistis' explanation, then fled with a quiet 'thank you' back to her desk, leaving the young woman alone once more with her persistent internet suitor.

She scrubbed determinedly at the headache forming behind her eyes before reluctantly opening the instant messenger once more.

**JacobM04: '…i want to slide my tongue all the way down your…' come on, instructor, you fill in the blank here. it's getting boring doing this with myself. if i wanted to get horny alone, i could have just gone into your bathroom with one of chicken wuss' dirty magazines.**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I have papers to be grading. And this is extremely inappropriate. **

**JacobM04: you always have papers to grade. come on, humor me; i'm goin' fuckin' stir crazy in here. hey, you goin' to the party that small, loud chick's throwing in your honor?**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Her name is Selphie, not 'small, loud chick,' and yes, I will be attending. **

_Only because I don't want Selphie bombarding me with phone calls all night demanding to know where I am. And because yesterday she came at me with an eyeliner and the kind of demonic look I would expect from a starving T-Rexaur that just spotted prey while we were trying out looks for the party. Trust her to organize Garden's extravaganza of the year in just a few days._

**JacobM04: fuckin' great. what am i supposed to do all night while the rest of you are out getting hammered?**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: You don't even **_**like **_**these types of things. You used to avoid them all the time.**

**JacobM04: yeah, well that's 'cause they're fuckin' annoying.**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Then stop complaining about not getting to go. **

**JacobM04: but this computer in your room is shitty and slow and i've looked through all your folders and can't find any naked pictures of you. the fuck kind of naughty schoolgirl are you, anyway?**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: The **_**non**_**-naughty type, and anyway I'm a teacher, not a schoolgirl.**

**JacobM04: semantics. anyway, i guess i just have to go off what i saw at the cabin. best part of the trip. **

Quistis hid her blush behind an artfully arranged hand.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Can I please get back to teaching my class? **

**JacobM04: you're probably just sitting at your desk anyway, watching them take one of your 40 million quizzes on boring ass shit like how to suck face with politicians.**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: …You **_**are **_**in my room, right? **

**JacobM04: yeah. i just know what it's like to be one of your students. anyway, you didn't answer my question on what i'm supposed to do while you're off making gooey eyes at squall and hoping rinoa trips on one of her heels and embarrasses the shit out of herself or whatever you women think about.**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I was over Squall a long time ago, and you're just going to have to wait until I get back, I suppose. Do something productive while I'm gone.**

**JacobM04: like what? stare at the fucking walls? been there, done that, for about 20 thousand fucking hours already. **

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I would dispute that, considering the fact that there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and we've only been back four days.**

**JacobM04: the fuck ever. at least tell me you're going to sneak me back some alcohol. **

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Of course. I'll just slip a champagne glass between my breasts--I'm sure no one will notice.**

**JacobM04: i'm gonna' pretend that wasn't sarcasm, since i can't see your face. that's actually kind of hot, trepe. what else do you keep there?**

She rolled her eyes.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I'm not going to dignify that with an answer.**

**JacobM04: you stick stuff down there, don't you? ever paid for something with gil that you kept in your bra?**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: **_**No**_**. Good-bye, Seifer. I'll be back tonight to change for the party. **

**JacobM04: in front of me at least, right? **

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Good-**_**bye**_**.**

**JacobM04: come on, dammit. what the fuck good is it having a female roommate if i don't get to watch her strip? **

***SexyBlondeWaiting4U has logged out***

* * *

As she stood at the fringes of the crowd with brightly-colored colleagues and students swirling around her in clouds of expensive material and lavishly-decorated bodies, Quistis almost wished she'd opted to brave Selphie's wrath and stay in with Seifer. At least her time spent with him was never boring, even if it usually proved infuriating.

Sighing, she smiled wanly and subtly ducked away from an approaching Trepie with the scared-witless expression on his face that indicated he'd finally summoned the courage to ask her to dance. Garden's courtyard, beautifully festooned with streamers of paper that caught the breeze and spun lazily, fluttering rainbows against the night sky, felt suddenly stifling. Even with the open sky laid prettily above her, draped in its finery of twinkling stars, Quistis felt the crowd and even her own clothing closing in around her.

Glancing around to make sure no one took any notice of her, she slipped quietly through several nearby hedges, removed her heels, and dropped bare-footed to the ground on the other side of the wall she crested.

"Tsk, tsk, Instructor, escaping your own party? That's not very polite."

Heart hammering, Quistis jerked back against the wall behind her, flattening against it while she swept the darkness around her for the source of the voice, even as a distant part of her recognized the timbre of that deep tone.

He stepped from the shadows, the moonlight glinting off his blonde head, telltale smirk in place as the silver illumination held captive in the strands of his hair flashed in his eyes as well. The emerald of that intense gaze flared with the moon's raw beauty, prying its way beneath her skin with dagger-sharp fingers.

The spell woven by the night's splendor snapped abruptly, like a string pulled too tight. "What in Hyne's name are you doing?" Quistis hissed, surging forward to grab him by the arm and drag him roughly into the fronds of a tall red plant growing nearby. "Do you understand what will happen to you if anyone sees you? Do you, Seifer?"

He shrugged. "I thought I'd take my chances. I can't stand one more second in that place, I'm fuckin' telling you. I'd rather be caught and get the firing squad than count one more damn crack in your ceiling."

She crossed her arms sternly and tapped her fingers in a nervous cadence against bare flesh. "What are you doing here?"

"Same thing you are. Trying to get away from that fucking awful music. What is that? The recorded passion of a T-Rexaur breeding a grat? Or is Chicken Wuss performing live?"

"I mean it, Seifer."

"So do I. They couldn't get a better band?"

She pressed her fingers to her temples. "Why. Are. You. Here?"

"Because I'm bored."

"And is being bored worth risking your life for?" she snapped.

"Careful, Trepe, you're almost starting to sound like you care what happens to my life."

"I _do _care, Seifer!" she replied sharply, then, realizing the jump in volume, pitched her next words more carefully. "I told you before I'm not about to let you take the fall for something you didn't do, and I meant it. But I can't help you right now--until I find some sort of evidence against the people who really killed Matron and murdered those teens, you're stuck. You knew this was how it was going to be coming back here."

Looking sullen, he jerked his arm out of her grasp and stalked over to the wall she'd leapt, jutting one hip up against it and allowing his head to fall back onto solid brick. "I know."

"Then why did you agree?"

"None of your damn business."

"Pleasant as always." Quistis snapped.

"What else did you expect?" he snarled back.

"Hyne." she sighed, struggling to rein in her warring emotions, fear and anger and something more all clashing violently in a vicious whirlwind inside her chest. _Why do I even bother? _"Why are we fighting again?"

"It's what I do best." he said, looking strangely at her.

_I certainly can't argue with that. _Quistis thought wryly. "Well, pretend to be someone else at the moment if you must, stop arguing with me, and get back to my dorm before you're caught."

"Pretend to be who? Squall maybe?" Seifer demanded, a nasty edge knifing along his words.

_What is his problem? _"I don't want you to be Squall. Where is this coming from all of a sudden?"

"Never mind." Seifer grumbled, scowling harder.

She heaved another sigh and took a moment to soothe the pulse thumping in the side of her neck with the same bass rhythm of the music floating down to them on a thread of horrendous screeching that Quistis assumed was supposed to be singing. Then, with her icy shield back in place once more, she turned to face him, hands hanging loosely at her sides, as though she could somehow placate him with a less defensive stance. "Seifer, please. Just get back to my room. How will I explain to Cid how you ended up here if someone discovers you?"

"Just keep your damn mouth shut. Whether or not you tell them you brought me here, it's going to end the same way."

"It doesn't have to." she said quietly, an ache splitting wide inside of her. There was pain in his eyes, revealed in all its sick anti-glory by the moon's gentle caress, highlighting the secrets in his gaze not normally visible to the naked eye. She wanted to take that away from him, to leave only the mischievous green of the devilish gaze, but no lecture or class she'd ever taught had hit on subjects such as these. Compassion 101 was not a topic deemed necessary for future mercenaries.

_But mercenaries or not, we're still human. Even Seifer, even when he doesn't want to be._

"I'll come back with you."

The pain slowly dissipated, replaced by the rogue glimmer she far preferred over the haunted stare of a man worn down to cinders by his own inner turmoil. "Do I get to watch you change this time?"

"_No_."

Seifer shrugged. "Sorry, no deal then."

Desperate, Quistis swallowed her distaste and threw out the suggestion. "I'll sleep in just my panties."

"A thong."

"_Boyshorts_."

"Those are fun too, but I really prefer something smaller. In red lace."

"Then you're welcome to help yourself to my drawer when we get back to my room." she said through clenched teeth.

He laughed, the mirth bubbling out of him, a rising cloud that swirled away into the sky and joined with the night breeze to kiss the stars shining far away.

"Keep your voice down!"

"Yeah, I'm sure someone's got laugh-recognition equipment aimed at me right now, loading their guns and calling in for back-up. Lighten up."

"This is your _life _we're talking about, Seifer."

His face changed again, the momentary joviality rippling into contemplative somberness. "Wasn't that much of a life anyway."

She didn't know what to say to that. It seemed as though her former student might have just come dangerously close to opening up, but she didn't know how to prompt a follow-up to that statement without scaring him off. "It's still a life, Seifer." Quistis responded finally, softly. "You can still make something of it."

"By being on the run for the rest of it? Knowing that everywhere I go I have to constantly look over my shoulder for the person just waiting to stab me in the back? The fuck kind of life is that, Trepe? You think I want to sleep in shitty, rat-infested motels for the rest of my life, eating out of dumpsters because I can't show my face anywhere and smelling like a damn sewer because none of those fucking motels even have running water?"

"You don't have to live like that. I said I would help you."

"And why the hell would you do that?" he snapped, bitterness a repulsive stain on the question.

"Because I want to." Quistis told him. "You can accept my help or not, but either way, its yours."

He looked away from her as the heinous abuse of the Garden Committee's speakers slowly pulsed into a softer ballad, full of ripe notes and longing, the kind of music that wrapped its chords around the heart and reminded Quistis of chasing ocean waves down a warm beach. She saw Matron's eyes and the raven banner of her hair as she hugged Seifer and Squall on either side of her while Cid hurriedly snapped a picture of the domestic scene before the blonde could squirm his way out of her embrace.

Unexpectedly, her eyes filled with tears again. This time she clenched them back, holding them as a quiescent burn inside the throat.

She noticed Seifer looking at her out of the corner of one eye and prayed the sheen over her gaze just resembled moonlight pooled in the irises.

"You know how to dance?" he asked suddenly, gruffly.

Surprised, she crossed her arms again, feeling suddenly as though she needed some type of barrier between them. "We all learned several styles of ballroom dancing as cadets; you know that."

He held out his hand, silver etching the scars that filled his palm, a map of pain and suffering imprinted in the flesh. "So?"

"I didn't say I danced _well_." she protested. "And we need to return to the dorms, before the party breaks up and someone spots you. There's no time to-"

"I snuck all the way out here." he interrupted. "I might as well do something."

Quistis leveled a strict glare on him. "If I dance with you _just once_, will you come back to my room with me?"

He smirked. "That sounds like an invitation."

"Seifer."

"Yeah, yeah. Keep your fucking pants on, Trepe. Or don't keep 'em on, I think the deal was."

"That's forfeit if I agree to dance with you."

"No it isn't."

She wrestled with the thought of arguing for a second, then finally acquiesced, if for no other reason than to hurry the whole ordeal along and sneak him back into the relative safety of her room, away from prying eyes. "Fine. But no thong."

"All right." he agreed. "See-through boy shorts."

"_No_." she said firmly.

A touch, on her hand, and fire through the veins. She shut up abruptly as Seifer slid an arm around her waist, the void between their bodies narrowing as he guided her through steps she hadn't visited since she was thirteen or fourteen. It was a void echoed in the pit of her stomach, one Quistis found slowly satiated by the warmth of his limbs and the steady drumbeat of his heart, a reassuring thunder beneath her ear as she pressed one cheek to his chest.

She found the boy in the man's surprisingly gentle touch, heard his laughter in the resonating pump of Seifer's heart, saw a flash of cornsilk gold behind closed eyes.

Matron chased after that cornsilk gold, her skirts taking flight behind her, snatched in the salty fingers of cool ocean breezes. The same breezes carried her laughter in soothing ribbons to Quistis' ears, lush and alive with the kind of warmth only a mother can offer.

She smiled this time as the tears finally escaped, squeezing beneath the lashes and spreading across the front of his shirt, a surge of heat in the approaching chill of midnight.

He was fucking developing feelings for her.

He didn't want to; Seifer grabbed desperately for the threads of ignorance, but they slid through his fingers like water, puddling on the ground at his feet like his resistance as she sank against him.

It was just a moment, just a single drop in the raging sea of eternity, and then he had to give her back. He had to let her go, and forget everything that brewed in his gut and his chest, because that was the only way he could survive when she was eventually taken away from him for good.

His chest hurt; it was a second-degree burn kind of pain, the kind that singed the nerves but didn't actually destroy enough to invite numbness. It was a kind of pain that felt like someone had rammed their fist through his ribcage and ripped out his heart, the kind of pain he wondered how people actually survived.

He closed his eyes, and buried his face in her hair. _Fuck. _

The music swam lazily around them both, invisible filaments that bound the bodies together, until that moment when the notes stopped, and reality closed like scissor blades around those filaments, a brutal snip he wanted to ignore.

He could remain in blissful ignorance for a while at least, until the screams began.

She smiled at him, but it was an unconvincing expression, one offered by an invalid trying to persuade a loved one to look on the bright side of things.

He glanced at her in concern. "Are you sure you don't want to leave?"

"I'm fine, Squall." Rinoa assured him, crossing her legs, the long limbs showcased beautifully by her sparkling red cocktail dress.

No amount of skillfully-applied makeup could conceal the ashen tint of her face, however, and even he could tell her lipstick had been layered on with a much heavier hand than normal. He knew she hadn't felt well the past week or so--just a general illness, he'd assumed, brought on by depression and stress. He'd hoped Quistis' appearance would perk her up a bit, but tonight she seemed worse if anything.

Squall frowned at the noisy crowd. He hated these things. In fact, he'd have gladly holed up in his room doing anything besides making uncomfortable, trivial conversation with everyone who seized the opportunity to kiss up to him, if it hadn't been for Selphie and her brutal finger jabbing and facial expressions that rivaled a T-Rexaur's furious sneer. Honestly, he didn't know how Irvine survived the relationship; sure, the woman looked as though she might easily be defeated by a strong gust of wind, but in reality Squall had fought less violent ruby dragons whose nests he'd disturbed. It was no wonder Irvine never strayed, despite his lady-killer instincts; one hint of infidelity, and he'd find himself missing the portions of his anatomy he held closest to his heart.

Sitting on the other side of Rinoa eating greedily from a plate stacked high with hot dogs, Zell offered the black-haired girl a sip from his wineglass. "You look kinda' pale, Rin. Feelin' all right?"

"Hot dogs and red wine; classy, Dincht." Irvine observed. Selphie-less for once, the spirited young woman probably off seeing to it that every aspect of her party was absolutely perfect, he looked viciously bored, the napkin shredded to an unfortunate demise between his fingers indicative of just how much fun he was having. He sighed and swept the flakes of paper into a pile in front of him, pulling his hat down over his eyes.

"Where'd Quistis go anyway?" Zell asked, sitting back and patting his stomach, the plate now sucked clean of all but the smallest crumbs. "I haven't seen her for a while."

"She probably did the smart thing and sneaked out. Ya' know, I love the woman, but sometimes I wish she wasn't so-"

"Selphie?" Zell offered.

"Somethin' like that."

"Squall." Rinoa moaned suddenly, whiter than ever now, pitching forward in her chair, caught at the last moment by his strong arms as he lunged forward to grab her before she could hit the ground.

Zell and Irvine both half-rose from their seats, looking anxious as she collapsed bonelessly in Squall's embrace, perspiration stippling the brow and bile painting an acid glaze across her lips.

"Squall." she murmured again, eyes fluttering erratically.

The music faded around him, a distant distraction through the ear canals, her labored breathing the only sound that mattered to him now as she convulsed.

"Hey!" Zell screamed. "Someone help! Go get the doctor!"

A few startled cries twined above the general din of conversation, hanging like a storm cloud over the party that fell into sudden quiet.

Squall cradled her head in one hand to keep it from smashing against the pavement as her body jerked and spasmed frighteningly in his grasp, the dark liquid of her eyes overtaken by ceaseless white. "Rinoa. Rinoa!"

He sensed more than felt the shift in atmosphere at first, a vague impression of electricity humming through the air and along the nape of his neck, prickling the hairs there. A vibrating buzz built and grew inside his ears, until he could hardly stand it, razors in the brain that shredded his mind apart.

He squinted through tearing eyes down into her face, and cried out in horror as she seemed to split apart at the seams, white-hot light blasting from the pores of her skin and burying itself in the pit of his gut.

Squall felt himself become airborne, just a brief sense of flight, a gush of weightlessness in the pit of his stomach and then the solid impact of the wall twenty feet behind him, and then--nothing.


	12. Chapter 11

**A/N: All righty, next chapter up finally. Sorry it took me a bit longer with this one--I've been pretty busy the last few weeks with various different things. That damn thing known as 'Real Life' has been getting in my way, but don't worry, I won't let it happen again. ;) Thanks to those of you who have reviewed so far. I appreciate your input. **

**Chapter Eleven**

Courtyard

Balamb Garden

She lifted her head from his chest as the first screams tore into her a split second before he began trembling.

Seifer collapsed against her, his weight too much for Quistis to take, spilling them both onto the pavement in a tangle of limbs. He turned his head to the side and vomited, blood flecking his mouth and nose, ejected in claret wads that shot like cannon blasts from between his teeth.

She jerked in horror beneath him as he retched, trapped under his body while he convulsed, a long scream tearing itself from his throat. It was the kind of shriek that ripped itself involuntarily from the body, an ululation of agony that cannot be contained, hooking in her mind like sharp talons and burrowing deep. "Seifer!" Fear strangled the word, turning it cold and hard in the pit of her gut.

He spasmed a couple of more times, then lay horribly still.

Breathing hard, panic taking flight inside her chest, Quistis struggled under his deadweight, trying to shift him off her as gently as possible. His head rolled limply onto her shoulder, gore marring the sensual mouth, soggy with the cherry stain of his own blood.

"Seifer?" The voice of a stranger slipped from her mouth, too-quiet and tentative, a hesitant whisper in the stagnant air of an atmosphere frozen in horror. It was as though the night itself held its breath while he breathed shallowly above her, oxygen a quiescent presence sluggishly crawling its way into her own lungs, her breath hitching unsteadily in rhythm with his own.

_He's going to die. _Quistis thought, the knowledge a grenade inside her skull, shrapnel that cut the brain wide open. Instinctively, she clutched her arms around his shoulders, holding him closer, as though somehow that would shield him from Death's grim sythe.

_No. Get ahold of yourself, Trepe. Concentrate. Figure out what's happening. _

As always in the midst of a crisis, Quistis' mind clicked into soldier mode, the gears humming seamlessly from the misfiring synapses of a frightened young woman into the cold calculation of one who has trained practically their entire life to endure violence and death.

It took her several long moments, but at last she pushed Seifer off her, cradling his head in her hands to keep it from hitting the ground, nimble fingers checking him for any obvious injuries and feeling the pulse that beat weak and uncertain in the side of his neck. It was that vague, indecisive thump beneath her fingers that threatened to tear the soldier from the woman and flay her apart from the inside, the weak, unsure motion so unlike the man wrapped around the frail organ.

Quistis' own heart turned over in her chest as blood dribbled from his nostrils, the snaking wisps growing, expanding in her vision until all she could see were those scarlet ribbons, pulling her stomach lower with each centimeter they descended his pale skin.

"Seifer?" His name caught in her throat, broken in half when it emerged. "Seifer, can you hear me? Seifer, please, if you can hear me, if you know I'm here, open your eyes." _Or say something! _she screamed internally. _Make one of your inappropriate, disgusting remarks, sit up and ask me what the hell I'm staring at. Seifer, please._

The mouth flapped open, introducing another ribbon of crimson that slid down his chin, the dark bead fluttering there for a moment before plunging soundlessly into her lap.

_-Laughter through his brain, the same bubbling mirth that haunted his dreams-_

_-Her voice through his guts, a hot poker to the intestines that embedded and twisted ruthlessly-_

_Nononononononononononononono…_

_"Hello Seifer. Do you remember me?" _

_-Slender white fingers around his throat, milky delicate and fragile, a frail garrote he could not escape-_

_"I never left you know. I've always been here. You can feel me, can't you? In your mind…in your heart. It's like the prickling of watching eyes, the knowledge that you are never alone, not quite, not even in your own body."_

_Her voice slit him open, raking along each internal organ as it dug deeper._

He arched up from where Quistis cradled him in her lap, screaming. The beautiful green eyes snapped wide, open and staring yet seeing nothing of the velvet sky above, the irises rolling wildly as though attempting to escape some intruder inside his own mind.

"Seifer!" She didn't recognize her own voice again, the syllables of his name fracturing into a million pieces.

Holding him tightly while he convulsed, Quistis looked frantically around for someone to aid them--but there was no one, she realized a split second later--even if the rest of the party weren't occupied with whatever fate had befallen them, one glimpse of Garden's most famous traitor would only bring everything crashing down around them. She had to fix this herself--she had to save him, because no one else cared to.

_"Oh yes…you do remember me. Can you feel that? Can you feel me inside you, taking everything apart on a most basic level? Do you know how easily I could rip your body apart, without any effort at all? Here--I'll demonstrate. I know you'll catch on quickly--you always were a fast learner, my Knight." _

_Pressure inside his eye socket, building like a cresting wave, firing off starbursts of pain inside his skull that swelled to an agony unlike any he'd ever experienced before. Even holding Quistis in his arms, dancing with her while the knowledge that his contentment was a a brittle, wasted thing soon to be gone, did not penetrate as deeply as this hurt. _

His right eye burst, the iris simply exploding, a grape squeezed too hard in a rough hand, its gel leaking down the curve of his cheekbone and spraying her face.

Quistis screamed with him this time, scrambling backward on shaking hands and knees as strips of his face peeled away, like weathered paint that curled from an aging house to reveal moist bone beneath, the foundation of his skull keeping a few shreds of flesh behind as the rest splattered at his feet.

_"You see? I can do the same to her, if you like. Such pretty blue eyes…I wonder how they'd look, gouged from her head, lying in your hands? Would you like them so much then?"_

"No!" The protest burst from him, the sight a terrible one as shredded lips peeled back to voice the shout and he reared up on both knees, clutching his bloody head in both hands, the bones of his fingers snapping with audible cracks, the nails torn away by some unseen force.

"_Get out of my head! Get out of my fucking head! Leave her alone!_" Seifer screamed, the dripping skull whipping around on his shoulders, flinging streamers of gore across Quistis' dress.

She staggered to her feet, trembling hands using the wall at her back to pull herself upright, bile swimming in her throat and spreading across her lips, an acidic tang against the taste buds as she fought valiantly to refrain from throwing up. _Oh Hyne…what's happening?_

_"You see? You feel it, don't you, Seifer. And I can put you back together again just as easily."_

_Warmth spreading in a honey-sweet glaze through his veins, coating the agony throbbing in his eye socket and the tips of his fingers, sealing it off until he no longer felt anything but a vague, faraway ache. A memory of her, a secret buried deep beneath the skin so he could never forget. _

_"Remember that, Seifer. Remember me…remember that I'm always here."_

Quistis fell again as she watched Seifer's face sowly rematerialize right before her gaze, pale and sickly-appearing but entirely normal, the tired green eyes flickering toward her after a long moment of staring blankly at his unharmed palms.

Unease slithered through her, reptile cold and slick against the throat.

"Seifer?" she whispered uncertainly, back on her hands and knees now without really recalling how she'd ended up there, the blue eyes wide and luminous under the light of the moon.

He took a stumbling step toward her.

His next step buckled one knee, and he went down, scraping his palms, moonlight winking cheerfully against the strands of his fair head. "I can't fucking get rid of her. She won't leave, Quistis--I've tried-" He shook his head, all the strength suddenly draining from his body, leaving behind a weariness that wouldn't allow him to even crawl over to her, no matter how badly he wanted to feel her gentle hands tangling in his hair and her soft cheek pressed to his own. He needed that so fucking badly right now--so badly it hurt, and he couldn't even fucking drag himself the ten feet that separated them.

He looked up at her with the eyes of a wounded animal, vulnerable and cornered and terribly, terribly scared.

"I'm sorry. _But I can't get her out of my fucking head. _She won't go away; I swear to fucking Hyne, she's _always _there, watching me, no matter what I do-"

"Seifer, it's all right." Quistis told him quietly, hesitantly shuffling her way toward him, uncaring that the sleek black formal wear she'd carefully donned earlier that night hung now in tatters around her knees. It had been bought at Selphie's insistence anyway--she held no real fondness for it, regarding the dress with the same bland detachment as she did all things of equal unimportance. "It's all right." she whispered, creeping to a halt in front of him, moving with extra care, as though she feared any sudden movements might scare him off.

She touched his face cautiously, and the smoothness of the skin, the scratch of the faint stubble shading his chin, ignited a relief so profound inside her that she began shaking almost as hard as he was. No blood, no tendrils of flesh dripping from the bones of his face like a skinned animal. _Thank you Hyne._

"It's all right. I promise, Seifer, it's all right." Quistis whispered, wrapping her arms around his neck and twining her fingertips in the fair hairs there, pulling his face down onto her shoulder as he trembled.

_You keep saying that. _he thought, burrowing his face into the side of her neck. _But you don't _know_, Quistis. For once in probably your whole fucking life, you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. _

Zell peeked cautiously from behind the overturned table he'd taken up cover behind, the jittery young man more twitchy than normal as an unnatural quiet settled over Garden's courtyard. It was a cloak of silence that reminded him of battlefields post-war, a stillness broken only by the sporadic, muffled sob or whimper of pain.

Beside him, Irvine stirred, blood streaming from a cut above one eyebrow, his hat lying crumpled beneath a table leg, smashed almost completely beyond recognition.

They exchanged looks, Irvine reaching up to wipe the blood from his forehead before it could run into his eye, the sharpshooter noticeably pale as he climbed unsteadily to his feet. Zell followed, glancing around at the Courtyard's destruction, scrambling out around the table and hopping a pile of debris to sprint his way over to the young woman lying in a deathly still fan of dark hair and pallid limbs. "Rin!" he yelled, stomach fluttering nervously, punching through the lining of his gut to drag its way up into his throat.

All around them, Selphie's decorations lay in ruin, ripped violently from trees and walls to lie in mangled heaps over the sprawled bodies of injured students. The shredded destruction of her hard work sparkled in Rinoa's raven strands, snowflakes on the obsidian glass of a frozen pond.

Heart in his throat, Zell sank down beside her, reaching hesitantly for her left wrist as Irvine jogged up behind him.

"She all right?" Irvine asked quietly, the cocky drawl dimmed from its usual bravado to a solemn grimness Zell didn't recognize.

The martial artist blew out an audible sigh of relief. "Yeah. Well, she's got a pulse at least. Man, what the hell happened here?"

"Dunno. Look, you jest stay here with her, all right Dinct? I'm gonna' check out Squall, make sure he's ok, and take a look around for Selphie and Quistis."

Zell nodded in agreement, his acquiescence unnoticed by his friend, who'd already torn off in search of his girlfriend. He turned his attention back to the prostrate young woman, holding her limp hand between his own, the unease that clogged his chest boiling over into his mouth. Hyne, maybe he shouldn't have eaten so many hot dogs earlier…

"Zell!"

He whipped his head around, blonde spikes dancing erratically, to find Quistis hurrying toward him, brow furrowed in concern, the slinky black dress she wore torn at the knees and smeared with splotches of what appeared to be blood. His face brightened at the sight of her, his fear for Rinoa dissolving slightly as she dropped to her knees beside him. "What's happened?"

"You ok, Quisty? Is that blood on your dress?"

"I'm fine. It isn't mine." she explained quickly, waving off his concern. "What happened here?"

"Dunno. Rinoa just started shaking and passed out. Then she just sorta' seemed to…I dunno how to describe it. All this light suddenly just exploded from her body. Must have been some kind of magic."

Quistis briskly looked over her friend while he talked, assessing the other young woman's injuries and checking her vitals as Zell looked anxiously on. Quistis had far more training in field med then he did, but she was by no means any expert. At any rate though, she couldn't find anything seriously wrong with the young sorceress--on an external level, at least. Hyne knew what sort of damage might have been acquired internally.

"I've called Dr. Kadowaki already. She'll be here right away. Any idea how many injuries and how serious?"

"Not really. Irvine's going to check things out. Squall got hit with the worst of it--slammed him into the wall over there. Probably gave him a concussion at least." He jerked his chin toward where the now hatless cowboy crouched beside Garden's limp commander, Squall's beautiful steel blue eyes ominously shut, his skin pale beneath a complicated lattice of bleeding gashes.

Quistis' heart fluttered anxiously as she took in the wreckage around them. Zell's hand crept cautiously onto one of her shoulders, warm and solid and reassuring. She touched his fingers lightly in acknolwedgement, brushing aside a few strands of hair that fluttered loose from her neatly-pinned updo. _Hyne--what the hell happened here?_

_"I'm sorry. _But I can't get her out of my fucking head. _She won't go away; I swear to fucking Hyne, she's _always _there, watching me, no matter what I do-"_

The chill that raked daggers of ice over Quistis' shoulders dug its claws into the column of her spine and fastened itself securely to each delicate sliver of bone. She felt the sensation repeated in the very tips of her fingertips, a cold that beat like a second heartbeat beneath her breastbone.

"_Get out of my head! Get out of my fucking head! Leave her alone!_"

"All right." Quistis said softly at last, tearing herself away from grim memories. You stay here with Rinoa--I'm going to take a look around and see if I can help anyone. Dr. Kadowaki's going to need some assistance from anyone with a decent knowledge of medicine for something of this magnitude, anyway."

She pushed up to both feet as he gave a terse nod and began picking her way through debris toward the various bodies scattered about like unwanted refuse, some moaning in pain and shock, others eerily still. She'd just paused to help lift a heavy banquet table from the awkwardly twisted body of a young woman when suddenly Irvine's frantic cries rang out above the soft weeping of the girl Quistis worked to help free.

"Shit. He ain't breathin'! I need some help over here! Squall's not breathin'!"

The chil jabbed deeper. Quistis jolted as though someone had slit open her gut and rammed a wire humming with live electricity inside, feeling the burn of a thousand acids congealing beneath her flesh, sizzling through her ribcage and into the fragile organs beneath. The table slipped through her grasp, and the man gripping the other side of it suddenly cried out in alarm as he abruptly took up her slack.

"Help! Help!" Irvine screamed as Quistis' world slowly shattered around her.

_"The fuck are you doing? Don't just go charging in to the rescue, you fuckin' moron! You don't know what's going on. I mean it, Trepe; don't go up there." _

_"Do you know something I don't, Seifer?"_

_"…No."_

_"Then I would appreciate it if you would let go of my arm. I need to find out what's going on and see if anyone needs help." _

_Always have to play the fucking cavalry, don't you, Quistis, dammit?_

He crouched, scowling, on top of the wall behind the shelter of several thick bushes, watching her wade determinedly into the courtyard's devastation, certain, Seifer felt sure, that she could right everything with a sweep of those icy blue eyes and a brush of the pearl white hand. But her supposed perfection couldn't rub off on anything or anyone else--he of all people knew that, because if that were the case, he ought to be a fucking saint by now.

Panic crushed his heart in its rough fingers. He had to get her the hell out of there now--the place fairly reeked of Ulticimea; he could scent her stench everywhere, could feel it slithering into the pores of his skin to take up residence there for all eternity, the kind of perfume that could not be scrubbed free in the hottest of showers. _And she just fucking walks right into the middle of it, completely oblivious. _

`He should have tackled her. He should have pinned her down, or knocked her out and carried her back to her dorm where she would awaken severely pissed but safe. That was all he wanted; he didn't care if she hated him--hell, he was used to people hating him by now--all Seifer wanted, all he _needed _was the knowledge that her cerulean gaze would spark its lively fire in his direction once again, that its shine wouldn't dim to the glassy navy of the stares he'd seen his victims wear.

He'd walked casually across the corpses of those who'd died defying him, and though now, without her power razing any twinge of conscience he'd once possessed, he felt a pang of guilt, it was nowhere near the mind-numbing despair that threatened to drag him down into a swirling vortex when he pictured Quistis crumpled similarily beneath his boots.

Seifer dug the heels of his palms into his forehead. _Stop making me picture her like that!_

Fuck this. He shifted behind his cover, leg muscles tensing in preparation for action. He'd go in after her, dammit, even if every single student in Garden spotted him and reported his presence to Cid. "Fuck you all." Seifer snarled to himself, batting aside a particularly heavy twig, its length dripping spiny green thorns.

A familiar voice broke into his angry declaration, shrill with terror, more high-pitched than he remembered; he half-stood from where he kneeled to identify the source of the cry, and found Irvine crouching beside a prone Squall, pale-faced and sweating nervously, an odd combination for the normally cavalier young man. "Shit. He ain't breathin'! I need some help over here! Squall's not breathin'!"

A whirl of motion at the corner of one eye drew Seifer's attention; he saw Quistis drop one end of a heavy-looking table and spin toward the commotion, the pain on her features evident even from this distance. He watched her take a shaky step forward--and then, suddenly, motion stirred directly in front of him, only a few feet away.

Rinoa twitched. Just an ever-so-slight tic, no more than an almost invisible tremor through the fingers of her left hand, the one Chicken Wuss clamped worriedly in his own. Seifer doubted the distraught young man had even felt the movement.

Fear broke loose inside him, like a flock of doves set joyfully loose into the sky, only to crash back to solid ground bleeding black from every orifice.

Quistis' blonde hair took flight similarily, streaming behind her as she dashed toward Squall and Irvine, drawing nearer the slowly awakening sorceress.

"No!" Seifer screamed, bursting from his refuge to intercept her. "Quistis, don't-"

Rinoa's head rolled slowly to one side, each sluggish inch gained with great struggle, as though she swam through an amber sea of molasses. The black strands falling like wounded ravens over the left side of her face parted abruptly, held aloft on a sudden breeze.

He froze mid-sprint, nearly falling over he skidded to a halt so quickly. He saw the fuzzy outline of Zell gaping in disbelief in him, saw Quistis too staggering to a stop and staring incredulously at him. But even those images softened and melted into oblivion after only a moment, until he could see only her face, beaming joyfully at him, one large doe eye crystallizing to solid ebony as he watched in horror.

_"Hello Seifer. I told you I would always be here."_

He threw up his arms as though to shield himself as the blinding white light exploded again, and a million shards of agony slammed like bullets into each vein.

Quistis heard Seifer screaming again as light engulfed her on all sides.

He disappeared in a violent starburst of illumination, and through slitted eyes, she watched Rinoa climb slowly to her feet, shaking Zell loose as easily as though he were nothing more than a rag doll. He flew through the air with a startled cry and impacted somewhere out of Quistis' line of sight--she heard him land but couldn't see his fate.

"Seifer…" she whispered, crawling forward on hands and knees until the heat of that illumination drove her back a few feet.

At its center, he curled in fetal position while Rinoa shuffled in drunken, swaying steps toward him. Her limbs swung loosely, oddly slack, almost as though--_someone else, someone not yet accustomed to the skin they now wore, controlled the slender body. _

Quistis' stomach rebelled violently. _No! Hyne, no!_

_"She won't go away; I swear to fucking Hyne, she's _always _there, watching me, no matter what I do-" _

"Seifer!" His name broke free of her lips with a will of its own, hurting her throat as it tore itself out. She dragged herself forward, burrowing into the pavement beneath with her fingertips, ripping nail down to the skin as she crawled toward him. The pain was terrific, a living creature beneath the skin that threatened to pluck away Quistis' very sanity. But she persisted, scrambling frantically as Rinoa edged ever closer, determined to reach the ex-knight before her friend did, though what possible good she could do once she did she had no clue.

His head rolled to one side, and the eyes, squeezed tightly shut before, snapped open and fastened on her.

"Get the fuck away!" he yelled. "Quistis! The fuck are you doing, idiot?"

Fingers lightly grazed Quistis' ankle. They burned the skin, searing right down to the bone, and she kicked out, panicked, as Rinoa laughed gaily and tightened her grasp.

_"She wants to come with you, my Knight. You want to be with her, don't you, Seifer? You want so very badly for just one person to love you--because you can't even love yourself, and she's the only one with enough forgiveness and stubbornness inside her to do it."_

The voice was not Rinoa's, but something far more ancient, far more terrible, and even Quistis' bravery quailed before it, liquefying her arms and legs, only long-instilled instincts keeping her from curling up in a terrified ball waiting for the long-feared monster from childhood to disappear with the sun's first reassuring touch.

Her eyes met Seifer's.

Grimacing, he rolled to his stomach, sliding his hands beneath him and heaving upward with all his strength, pushing back up onto his knees with straining difficulty. Quistis saw something glint in his right hand, its shine competing with the light pouring from Rinoa's body.

_"I never go anywhere without a weapon, Instructor. You always told us to be prepared." _Not just the empty, self-assured bragging of a conceited student, then. But he couldn't… "Seifer, no! Don't kill her!" She just barely summoned the energy for the words; it seemed as though Rinoa's cold touch leeched away her very life force, draining vitality the same way a bathtub drains grimy water.

He swung his arm back, whipped it forward again--and suddenly Rinoa was before him, leaving Quistis collapsed in the broken ruin of her own emotions, relief mingling with horrified revulsion. The deceptively dainty hand closed around his throat, lifting Seifer off his feet.

Quistis heard laughter again--it was Rinoa's and yet somehow not, the same way the voice held the slightest tinge of her cheerful timbre but was most definitely not hers.

"Seifer!"

"Stab…her!" he ground out between clenched teeth. "Do it!"

She eyed the knife gleaming a few inches away from her fingers where it had landed after passing harmlessly over Rinoa's shoulder.

_"…Seifer, I'm disappointed in you. You were my Knight, my protector."_

Rinoa laughed happily, and motioned with a hand.

Quistis felt herself sliding toward the center of the action, tumbling wildly until she bumped up against the back of Rinoa's legs. The young woman didn't even glance down, but merely struck out with her free hand--Quistis felt the impact deep in her chest, and gasped.

She looked down to find Rinoa's arm buried to the elbow in her solar plexus.

_"I can pull everything out of her, Seifer." _the voice hissed, coiling like a nest of snakes around them both, sibilant and terrifying. _"I can rip her apart like she was nothing, like she never existed. I'll let you watch; you've watched me do this before, haven't you? Do you remember?" _

Quistis opened her mouth to protest, but no words emerged, just blood, a snaking thread of it dribble down her chin to splotch the already ruined dress.

Rinoa's arm twisted, and she arched upward, screaming.

_Hyne Hyne no no no no no no no…_

He thrashed in Rinoa's grip, twisting until Quistis thought he might break his own neck. Maybe that was his intention--maybe that was the quickest way out of this, a swift death over in seconds, relatively painless, not the prolonged agony Rinoa would make them both suffer.

"Sei…fer…" The words rode a gush of blood.

_"I can fix her too. But I don't want to do that right now. I know you Seifer--and I know you care about her. And I want you to watch. I want you to watch while I do what she and the others did to me--I'm going to tear her apart, rip everything from her that makes her Quistis Trepe. You'll like this, I'm sure. You always did enjoy violence." _

He flailed out with one hand, and jabbed her in the eye, driving deep with his fingertips, until finally she jerked her head back, the socket bruised and scratched.

_"You shouldn't have done that."_

The black eyes flickered toward Quistis.

Seifer twisted his body, flailed out with both hands, locked them securely around the limb that stabbed Quistis through the chest, and snapped it with a reverberating crack.

Rinoa reeled backward, and Quistis felt emptiness inside her chest once more--not the reassuring kind, but more of a hollowness that seemed to fester where her heart should have been. Dimly, she heard screaming and saw Rinoa's broken arm flap grotesquely in her direction as the other hand let loose of Seifer's neck.

She looked up to see him diving toward her as a spear of white sizzled toward her, a lightning blast that sprung from white fingers into Seifer's ribcage as he threw himself in front of it.

* * *

_The ocean provided a soothing background to her lackadaisical thoughts, the crash of its waves and the cooing of gulls overhead a peaceful soundtrack that brought a lazy smile to Quistis' lips. Salty breezes playfully skipped her hair across both cheeks, a faint crust on the lips that she tasted at the back of her mouth. _

_"You look happy." he growled, the severe line through the scar on his brow as prominent as ever._

_"I like the beach. It relaxes me. It wouldn't hurt you to let it do the same to you." _

_He was standing just a ways off from her, dressed in a billowing white shirt unbuttoned over bare tanned skin, bright hair slanting over solemn green eyes. Nipping water teased the edges of his loose khakis, rolled up to the knees and dusted with a light coating of sand, foam scrawling random patterns across the cuffs of his pants. He looked fearsome and dangerous, glazed in the sun's light like some warrior preserved eternally in sculpture, the legend living on even after the body had long since succumbed to the inevitable. _

_She propped her chin on one hand, studying him. _

_"Seifer…are we dead?"_

_"I think so." he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and turning to look at her. "Does that bother you? Being dead…with me, I mean?" _

_He looked uncharacteristically pensive, and she wondered if her answer actually meant something to him. _

_"…Well, yes." _

_He scowled. "Thanks a fucking lot, Trepe."_

_"I didn't mean it like that. Don't get so touchy. It's just, I had things…things I still wanted to do." _

_He looked back out over the ocean, the hair at the nape of his neck ruffling like a field of disturbed wheat. "Like what? More papers to grade or something?"_

_"That's not all I do, you know." she scolded, though her voice held no real malice. She couldn't find it in herself to be angry with him at this moment--maybe it was her own disappointment, that her life had ended so abruptly, while she was still so young with so much to accomplish. But then again, hadn't she mentally prepared herself for that since first entering Garden? She'd known she would in all likelihood never live to see herself build a family and a life beyond homework and gunfire. _

_Or maybe, her reluctance to speak harshly to him stemmed from the fact that he looked almost lost at that moment, like a little boy who'd wandered too far from his mother. _

_Quistis stood slowly, dusting off the back of her pants. She tilted her face into the sunlight, and closed her eyes. _

_"I wanted all the things most women want eventually, I suppose. I would have liked to marry; not right now of course, several years down the line, but…it must be nice to know that somewhere out there, someone is smiling just because you exist." _

_He let that sink in for a few long moments, then snorted loudly. "That's it? That's all you want? No grand ambitions?"_

_"I was never like you, Seifer." she replied quietly. "I never wanted to have the world at my feet. I just wanted a simple life that I could enjoy. I liked order--I would have been perfectly happy retiring from the field eventually, continuing with my teaching, building a nice little home with someone, traveling and seeing some more of the world. Experiencing something beyond death and…difficult students." Quistis finished, with a smile aimed at him that revealed she'd been thinking of one 'difficult student' in particular. "What did you want to do?"_

_"Nothing important. World domination, put together a harem, see Squall give a pre-battle pep talk in a frilly pink dress."_

_She rolled her eyes. "Very ambitious." _

_"Seifer! Quistis!"_

_The musical chime of her voice wrapped around them, turning both heads toward the black-haired beauty that ran, smiling and waving, down the beach toward them. There was an anguish in her eyes as she drew closer that tugged at Quistis' heart, but the smile did not waver, and behind the anguish lurked a tentative joy that puzzled her. _

_"I'm sorry, you two. I overpowered her for a few minutes, but I don't think I can hold out against her for very long." _

_Seifer stepped in front of Quistis, glaring down on the petite young woman. "Yeah, well it would have been nice to warn us about that a little earlier!"_

_"Seifer! It isn't her fault."_

_"Still fucking hurt." he muttered, crossing his arms over his chest._

_"Go back." Rinoa whispered. "I'm sending you guys into Time Compression. Go back and stop me, ok? Even if you have to kill me. I don't want to hurt anyone, so I want you to stop me any way you can, ok? Don't worry about what happens to me." _

_"Rinoa…" Quistis intervened, stretching out a hand toward the young woman as though in supplication, then abruptly drawing it back. _You can't ask me to do that, Rinoa. I could never do that to Squall. I could never do that to any of us. Don't you realize that, though you may irritate me sometimes with how girly and downright helpless you sometimes are, you make the world just a little bit brighter? I've never met someone with your optimism and enthusiasm for life before. I don't understand it at all, but I can admire it.

_"And be happy, ok?" Rinoa whispered, scrubbing a tear from the corner of one eye. Still smiling, she reached out, and Quistis felt delicate fingers close around her own--replaced a moment later by the large, callused presence of Seifer's palm. She glanced down to find them holding hands, focusing on that union of flesh as the beach suddenly flared brightly around them all, a flash of illumination that blinded her. _

_And then she was swimming, falling, running through an endless ocean of black, with Seifer's warmth gone from her side and a terrible cold filling that void, her breath puffing before her in white clouds that sailed away into the ebony sea, leaving her truly alone--_

_* * *_

And in a searing explosion of light, sound and sensation, Quistis was back in his arms, swaying on the gentle swells of that soft ballad.

She untangled herself from his embrace immediately, and barking a stern order at him, "Stay _here_, Seifer," rushed off toward the main party with heart in her throat.

She burst into the middle of the scene as Rinoa's first tremors began, and screamed a warning to Squall as he bent worriedly over his fiancé, barreling straight through a couple dancing closely together. "Don't touch her! Squall, back away!"

"Quistis? What the hell's goin' on?" Irvine asked, confusion wrinkling his forehead as he stood up to assist.

"Don't touch her, Squall! It's Ulticimea! Ulticimea is inside Rinoa somehow! Stay away from her!"

_Go back and stop me, ok? Even if you have to kill me. I don't want to hurt anyone, so I want you to stop me any way you can, ok? Don't worry about what happens to me." _

Quistis swallowed thickly. _I can't, Rinoa. Please, you can't ask me to do that. _

"Zell, get ahold of Dr. Kadowaki right away! I need her tranquilized." She shouldered Squall aside with such brusqueness his mouth dropped open in shock, and, with such suddenness no one moved in time to stop her, pulled back a fist and slammed it squarely into Rinoa's pretty little jaw.

"Hey, what the hell're you doin,' Quisty?!"

"Zell, do it now! Or give me your phone! We don't have very long. We need her put into a coma before Ulticimea can awaken--Zell, please! It's the only thing I can think of without killing her!"

"'Killing her?'" Squall repeated darkly, holding Rinoa tightly in his arms, the flesh of her chin already darkening from the force of Quistis' hit. "Get the hell away from her. I don't know what's wrong with you, but-"

"I'd do what she says. Give me the fuckin' phone, Chicken Wuss."

_No. _Quistis closed her eyes in defeat. _Seifer, no. What are you doing? _

She spun around to find Zell standing stiffly, a thin slash of silver glittering at his throat, Seifer looming behind him with one hand fisted in the shorter man's hair and the blade of his knife set firmly against white skin.

_-Madness poured bright and glittering into the beautiful gemstone eyes-_

_-President Deling's terrified whimpers, mewling cries that matched the agonized bellow of her stomach as he took his first step into the one place she couldn't follow-_

Zell twitched, and Seifer gripped him more firmly. "On second thought, you, with the hat--get it for him. I don't want him moving."

Irvine looked hard at Quistis. "What the hell's goin' on here?"

Conversation stuttered to a halt around them, even the music coming to an abrupt stop as all eyes turned to the tense situation brewing at the center of the celebration, awed exclamations and a few frightened protests erupting as people began recognizing Seifer.

Quistis' lips moved without producing sound, her gut coiling back around her spine. Shrinkwrapped to the vertebrae, it refused to move, planted securely there as her mind desperately flipped through viable excuses.

Seifer answered for Quisist without looking at her. "The fuck do you think is happening? I'm crashing her party. Now, do you want to get that phone, or do I have to slit his throat open?"

Irvine stood off against Seifer for a tense moment before finally moving forward, going slowly to assure Seifer that he was not about to launch an attack. He reached inside the lapels of Zell's jacket and retrieved the demanded item, then handed it to Seifer with hatred burning in his eyes.

"Not me, her. No one's going to listen to me." he said, jerking his chin toward Quistis.

Irvine dutifully handed the phone to her, which she took in trembling hands.

Seifer shoved Zell forcefully away from him, knocking him into the tall sharpshooter and stumbling both into the table behind them, which overturned with a terrific crash.

Quistis saw Irvine lunge as Seifer threw the knife aside and laced his hands in surrender behind his head, then turned away with fear burning her throat while she dialed the infirmary's number with shaking fingers.

* * *

"How many people did you bribe to get the guards to leave?" he asked casually.

She clasped her hands primly in front of her, taking in the silhouette of his body, smelling of death and drenched in long shadows where it lay across the too-short cot.

That was only her imagination of course; his scent was of sweat and dried blood, but she knew death would soon follow, knew the green pinpoints directed at her with the intensity of lasers would soon permanently lose their shine. It was what she had feared most of all, and it had happened so quickly, before they'd even gotten a chance to begin compiling evidence to prove his innocence.

His mouth tipped in a lazy smile, and he hooked his hands behind his head. "Tsk. Daydreaming, Instructor. Three hours detention."

"Can't you take this seriously, Seifer?" Quistis asked thickly at last. "They're going to kill you."

He shrugged.

"What you did was incredibly stupid. I _told _you to stay put. If for once in your life you could have actually obeyed orders, we wouldn't be in this situation-"

"Come on, Trepe. Me, obey orders? You should have known _that _was never gonna' happen. And what do you mean 'we'? There is no 'we' in this 'situation.' They're killing me, not you, so don't worry about it."

She clenched her hands into fists, fighting against despair. She could see, just vaguely, the familiar smirk crawling its way across his mouth, but it seemed a stale shell, its arrogance stained by the shadow that slithered in his eyes.

"So tell me the truth; Chicken Wuss crapped himself when I held that knife on him, didn't he?" Seifer asked, chuckling lightly.

"This is not a _joke_, Seifer. I don't know how much I can help you anymore."

His eyes darkened. "I'm not asking for your help. In fact, I think I told you several times to mind your own damn business."

She stomped right up to the bars of his cell, pressing her face to cold steel, staring him down with as much menace as he'd ever seen Quistis muster; the storm of emotions raging in her eyes startled him a little, enough to sit upright and rest his hands on both knees. "You just don't understand, Seifer-"

"I do understand. You're pissed because--once again--you failed. And--once again--I represent your failure. Don't try to fucking tell me you just want to help poor little misunderstood Seifer. That's bullshit, Quistis, and we both know it. You're just mad because your damn perfection was ruined by me once again. I just seem to keep fucking up your record, huh? Well, don't worry. I won't be around too much longer."

She just shook her head, looking away from him, shoulders slumping now as though beneath some great weight. When she at last spoke again, her voice rang very softly through his prison, burdened with the heavy weight of sorrow. "No, you don't understand, Seifer. But then, you never tried to."

He paused, letting that sink in for a moment. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"Why didn't you stay where I told you to?" she asked instead.

"Tch. I dunno." He shrugged again. "Guess I knew they'd be too stupid to listen to you. Or else I was just pissed at being bossed around again. You did that even when we were little kids--you remember that?"

"Vaguely. It comes back to me in bits and pieces sometimes." Quistis admitted, leaning her forehead against the door of his cell.

Seifer stood up and pushed his hands into his pockets, coming a couple of steps closer to her. "So did Dr. Kadowaki get everything under control with her?"

"I thought you didn't care about anyone else?"

"Don't. Just nosy."

"I don't know about 'under control.' Rinoa's contained for the moment, yes; she's been put into a sort of suspended sleep, basically a drug-induced coma. Hopefully that'll keep Ulticimea under wraps until we can figure out what to do. Dr. Kadowaki's run some tests on her and noticed some very strange brain activity, so my story's believed, though it's been a bit difficult trying to come up with answers to how I knew about Ulticimea." She paused for a moment, forming her next words carefully. "Zell said he came to see you a couple of days ago."

"Yeah. Told him I don't want Chicken Wusses hanging around my place, even if it is a little shithole like this. It's getting kind of homey, actually. This is where they stuck me when they thought I was the one who'd attacked you way back at the beginning of all this shit."

"Are you going to send me away too, then?"

"Nah. Not even going to try. Chicken Wuss isn't as stubborn as you--didn't take much to send him crying back to Squall." He smiled without humor. "I probably got him to persuade Squall to tack on a few extra bullets to my execution. That's how they're gonna' do it, right? Or did Squall think of something that lasts a little longer? Kind of a quick end for someone like me, if you think about it. Maybe they could let me sit in on one of Instructor Delbin's lectures--that would bore me to death."

She reached through the bars and brushed her fingertips lightly against the front of his shirt, the only part of him she could reach.

He froze as the barest contact of her fingers penetrated the material of his shirt to burrow beneath bare skin, settling as a heated film across his flesh, tingling pleasantly in the damp chill of his surroundings. He tried not to acknowledge how much that touch meant to him, how much he wanted to feel it against the side of his face, cradling his cheek as he siphoned some of his pain into her--because fucking Hyne, he didn't know how much longer he could take this, how much hurt a man could bear before he finally just snapped in half beneath the weight of it. He wanted a mother to push the hair from his forehead, smooth her fingers across his scar, and correct everything with a gentle smile. He wanted a friend to tell him jokes and remind him that they loved him, even if no one else did. He wanted to not be alone for one damn second in this world. _But you turned them away, didn't you? Just like you're going to turn her away. You didn't listen to anything Fuijin or Raijin wanted to say before you told them to get the fuck out of your face and let you sleep. _

Seifer slapped her hand away as she rested it gently against him. "Don't touch me."

"You can't keep pushing everyone away, Seifer."

_I've done a pretty damn good job of it for a long time. I think I can keep it up for just a little bit longer. _

"You know what? Changed my mind about what I said earlier. Get the hell out of here. You're boring me."

_Don't chase her away, you fucking moron. She's probably the only one who will ever really give a shit what happens to you, for some Hyne unknown reason. _

"No." Quistis said simply, crossing her arms over her breasts. "You said it yourself; I'm stubborn, and there's no point in even trying to send me away."

"Someone has to come get you eventually." he snapped. "They're probably worried I'll start rubbing off on you. Although I can't wield _that _much influence over the great Quistis Trepe in--what do I have left? Maybe a week? Should take about that long to work out all the legalities of executing a war criminal."

He flung himself back down on his cot, facedown so he didn't have to look at her anymore. That hurt even more--before, with only the darkness and the faroff plink of dripping water, he could almost stand it. But with her staring in at him like that, he just wanted to crawl off into a dark corner and fold himself into the smallest ball, scream out every ounce of frustration and longing and fear inside him until his vocal cords shredded themselves apart from the force of his shrieks.

With her staring at him like that, it reminded him of what he was leaving behind, even if he'd never really had it.

"You don't have to talk if you don't want to." she said quietly. "Just listen. Seifer…I will miss you. I want to try and fix this, but if I can't…it's going to leave a hole inside me. I guess there was a place reserved just for my smart ass old student after all, even if I always told myself there wasn't. I always had high hopes for you, and while maybe some things…ok, nothing, worked out quite the way I originally planned…I think you turned out all right. Better than you think. And I want you to know that I'll…think of you. That's all you need to know, isn't it? Because no matter how much you pretend you don't care about being alone, I think at some point everyone would like to know that somewhere out there-"

"Someone is smiling just because you exist. That's what you were going to say, wasn't it?" he interrupted, and to his horror his voice sounded a little thick to his own ears.

A long silence stretched between them, strung out tautly, like steel wire stretched to the breaking point. When she finally spoke again, there was a gentle smile in her voice. "I don't know how much I've smiled because of you. Occasionally, yes, although I think there have been more broken coffee mugs and explicit language than smiles on your account."

He smirked despite himself, pressing his face tight into the single lumpy pillow provided to him.

"I won't leave. But if you like, I won't say anything else. I just needed to get that off my chest."

He turned that over in his mind for a moment, hanging onto the dying threads of her voice, clutching desperately in the dark for that lifeline. "Tell me the stories Matron used to tell us."

"Stories?" she sounded a little startled. "You mean, fairy tales, children's storybooks, that sort of thing? I don't know how well I can remember them."

"Doesn't matter. Just think about it for a while."

"Ok. Did you want sound effects, too?"

He pulled his face away from the pillow's hard discomfort to find her smiling at him, the expression tinged with a resigned sadness, but also a softness he didn't normally associate with the Ice Queen. Seifer found himself returning the expression against his will, and the buoyancy that suddenly expanded his chest scoured the darkness from the corners of his soul.

For a while, at least. Until reality struck him with its brutal slap, he could close his eyes as she spoke and remember faraway beaches, the scent of chocolate chip cookies, and a little girl wearing her blue eyes.


	13. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**

Infirmary

Balamb Garden

_She stood in its rippling grasses, enticed by the sweet amalgamation of wildflowers thriving in feral tangles all around her. _

_The soft flow of her skirts drifted near to her, caught and gathered in the wind's grip, flung gently across bare legs, an undulation of motion to match the sway and bend of flower stalks all around her._

_Over the far horizon, the sun bid a colorful farewell, its ruby descent painting the meadow in bloody strips of light. _

_"Rinoa, why did you bring us here?" he asked quietly from behind her. "You know I don't like it when you use your magic to control my dreams."_

_"I'm not controlling them, silly. Just guiding a little. And don't you like this place? It's where you made your first promise to me. Remember?" Her lips spread in a soft smile as she turned to face him. Backlit by the sun's flames, her cheeks glowed with a delicate rose light that seemed to emanate from her very pores themselves, blushing illumination that shimmered along each moonlight curve of her cheeks. He softened despite himself as she stepped toward him, holding out his arms as she folded gratefully against him. _

_Squall closed his eyes and buried his face in her hair. This was all he needed. If he could just keep this feeling forever, this warmth that pulsed between them, he would never ask Hyne for anything else ever again. If Hyne would just hold back the darkness Squall sensed gathering like sullen storm clouds just out of his sight, He'd never know a more loyal follower than Garden's commander. _

_Rinoa hugged him back tightly, her arms pressing with a firmness her pale, still body couldn't muster back in reality, away from this world of sighing grasses and lustrous sunsets. _

_"Squall, I have to tell you something." she whispered into his chest. _

_The pulse thumping rapidly beneath her lips twitched, stopped, and hardened to a solid lump in the center of his chest. He felt a coldness enter him that even the sun's warmth couldn't banish had he been sitting right in its very core. _

_"Do you remember what I said a long time ago? That if it's you, I guess it's all right? I told you I wouldn't mind if you had to kill me." _

No.

_"Well you have to do it, Squall. She's inside me. I can feel her trying to get free. I can't hold her back much longer." _

_"No!" he hissed through clenched teeth, pulling away. _

_She looked hurt, eyes glossy with unshed tears. "Do it while I'm in a coma--I won't feel anything. You won't hurt me." _

_"I'm not even going to discuss this."_

_"You have to, Squall, please. You have to be strong for the others. You've always been strong for me--I need you to be strong again, just one more time, ok?"_

_"No!" he hollered, his raised voice such a rare occurrence that she flinched back. "You've been possessed before; we'll figure something out." _

_"She's stronger this time, Squall, I can feel it. I don't know why she's inside me, but something happened when we defeated her--we didn't destroy the core of Ultimicea. I think…I think she's probably really old. She knows a lot more about any of this than we do. You know before? When I was sick, and you thought I just had the flu or something? That was her poison, leaking into me. I'm poisoned, Squall, and this time I don't know how to fix it." _

_He turned his back on her, shutting his eyes in agony, his throat aching so badly he thought it might rupture. Her arms slipped gently around his waist, and she rested her cheek on his back, her breath warm on his skin even through his shirt. "Please, Squall." Rinoa whispered. "Do it now, before she breaks free again. I'll forgive you--I'll always forgive you, ok?" _

_He shook his head, then, overwhelmed by a surge of helplessness, lifted both hands to his face and buried it in them. He couldn't keep his usual tightly-reined control over his emotions, dammit, not with her pretty lips spewing such awful things, not with the pressure of her arms around him reminding him forebodingly of a bittersweet good-bye. He was going to fly apart right here, shatter into a million brittle pieces, because even her tender arms couldn't hold him together under this burden. _

_"I don't mind if it's you." she whispered, standing on tiptoes to kiss his shoulder where it curved into the slope of his neck. "Really, Squall." _

_Acid tears clung to his eyelashes. _But I need you…

_"Rinoa…I can't…" he said hoarsely, and his voice sounded broken even to his own ears. _

_"You can, Squall. You're the bravest person I know." _

I'm not as brave as you think I am. I can face all the stress of helping run Garden without going insane because I know you're waiting, somewhere, for me with a smile. I can relive getting lost in Time Compression because I know that you'll always find me somehow.

_"No…no." _

_"I love you Squall."_

Don't leave me like this…we were supposed to have a life together…Rinoa…

_* * *_

When he stirred out of unconciousness, Squall felt the burning heat of those tears follow him into reality, soaking her limp, icy fingertips where they lay joined with his.

He sniffed quietly and wiped his eyes with his free hand, stroking his thumb lightly along the curve of her wrist, searching behind the closed eyes for some indication of the energetic young woman who'd stood in a crimson meadow with him. Just a flicker, the tiniest of motions…anything to imply she still existed beneath the devouring presence that was Ultimicea.

"Squall."

He jolted at the sound of his name and whipped around toward the infirmary's entrance, pissed with himself for allowing someone to sneak up on him like that. So much for his soldierly instincts.

Quistis regarded him through solemn eyes. From the ashen smudges beneath the blue gaze, he deduced she'd slept as fitfully as he over the past few days, the same weariness visible in the untidy rumple of her normally impeccable clothing. She looked sadly at Rinoa's unmoving face, a pained tightness sketching itself around the corners of her lips.

"How long have you been here?" she asked, taking a few steps toward the disheartening scene.

"Doesn't matter." he replied brusquely.

"Making yourself sick with lack of sleep and food isn't going to help Rinoa any."

He remained obstinately silent.

"Squall…" Quistis sighed heavily. "We'll find a way to help her. Zell and I have been researching Ultimicea in the library; there's information on her dating back hundreds of years, and while we haven't found anything useful yet, it must just be a matter of time before we uncover something."

He brushed a hand gently along one of Rinoa's arms. "Doesn't Seifer need you?" he said, not recognizing the hoarse bitterness of his own voice.

Silence spiraled between them. "What do you mean?"

Squall let go of Rinoa's hand at last and dropped his face into his hands again; he seemed to be doing that a lot lately. It was the only thing that quelled the tears of helpless rage, or hid them when even he couldn't hold back anymore. "I thought I could blame all of this on him somehow. I went down there to see him. I think…I could have killed him or something."

Behind him, Quistis moved stealthily, stepping carefully until she drew even with the chair he'd pulled up beside his comatose fiancé. Gently, she touched a hand to his shoulder and crouched down to his level, saying nothing as Squall struggled with his words, his speech clipped in a way entirely different from the curt syllables he'd used as her student.

"You were there…next to his cell…asleep…and so was he. And he looked…maybe not happy, but at peace at least." he ground out, the words muffled by his palms.

"We talked for a while." Quistis answered honestly. "I thought he could use some company."

"You brought him back into Garden, didn't you?"

"Yes." she replied immediately, omitting Zell's part in Seifer's return. "I gave him a second chance a long time ago, and I'm not going to take it away just because he's been unjustly accused."

"Do you love Almasy?"

He looked up at her finally, the eyes dry and composed but burning with an inner anguish that made her chest hurt. She recalled the agony of Rinoa's arm driving through bone and soft tissue, and thought that she probably hadn't experienced a single drop of the pain that blazed with hellish warmth inside Squall. "That's an odd question."

Squall kept his gaze firmly on hers, waiting for her answer.

"Seifer and I have a…strange relationship. I'm not sure I'd even call us friends. We're not lovers, if that's what you want to know. I believe, or I'd like to anyway, that on some level we understand each other a little."

He nodded tersely, apparently satisfied with that.

"Will you get some sleep, then, if I've satisfied your curiosity?"

"I can't leave her." Squall replied, shaking his head.

Quistis stood, tucking a coil of hair absently behind one ear. "All right. Are you hungry? I'll bring you something from the cafeteria."

"No."

"Do you need anything?"

_I need Rinoa to wake up and smile at me without…_her _staring out from her eyes. _

"No."

"All right. I'll give you some time alone with her then." She turned to leave, pausing in the entryway and looking back over her shoulder at him. "Squall, we'll bring her back to us." Quistis promised him softly. "We'll find something."

And with that she disappeared, leaving behind only a faint floral impression, a lingering memory of her shampoo, and a heaviness in his heart that failed to disperse at her assured words.

_2,093...2,094...2,095... _

Fuck, he was bored. Seifer had known, from previous experiences, that incarceration was not one of life's more entertaining moments, but he hadn't realized until Quistis slipped away early that morning just how tedious it really was. Boredom had not gnawed so determinedly at him before her arrival, when he possessed only the rats and nervous young guard as company. But perhaps that in itself was the problem; perhaps her appearance and subsequent absence forced him to realize just how alone he really was, how desperately his prison's shadows pursued him deep into his mind and how equally desperately he strove to outrun them.

It never seemed as difficult, battling those demons, when she was around. He didn't quite understand the phenomenon and chose not to examine it too closely; if he did, it would probably only drive him fucking insane. Quistis tended to do that to him.

He swung his feet lazily back and forth, jostling them lightly against the metal frame of his cot. The insistent clank of leather on steel drew several wincing glances from the young man standing a few feet away, shoulders hunched and one hand anxiously plastered to the handle of his gun. Seifer honestly didn't know why they bothered; probably just show. He wasn't going anywhere, not unless the kid was dumb enough to hand him the key and wish him a happy life.

Even if he did make it beyond Garden, what then? How many people would chase him to the ends of the earth to bring him to justice? He'd spend his entire miserable existence looking over one shoulder, studying each face with equal parts wariness and scorn. He had his desires, of course, his plans for the future, but his ambitions had come tumbling down around his ears like an upset house of cards a long time ago; if Seifer were honest with himself, what did he really have left to live for? He was a skeleton, wearing a thin façade of flesh that really did nothing more than hold him together.

Still, his persistent willfulness balked at the idea of simply giving up, of walking meekly to his fate before their waiting guns. The old romantic notions still lurked somewhere deep inside his heart, too deeply-ingrained to completely bury, grand delusions of blazing glory and heroic demises sneaking their way into his dreams between flashes of blonde hair and blue eyes.

_Is she going to watch? _Seifer wondered, lacing his hands behind his head, his eyes returning to the ceiling cracks he'd spent the better part of an hour counting. Executions were usually open to the public, and his would be sure to attract plenty of eager attention. The circling vultures would finally receive their greatest wish; the grisly and ultimate death of Seifer Almasy, who'd avoided their bullets once already, dodging their contempt the same way he evaded the slash of an opponent's gun blade.

Would little old women sleep better at night, knowing he was gone at last? Would children walk the streets in peace once more, without the threat of Seifer Almasy lurking in every deep pocket of shadow they passed? Had he really been so despised? Why had no one else shared Quistis' opinion, that perhaps he'd only been an unfortunate victim, a puppet dancing to the tune of her mad laughter?

_But you didn't even want _her _understanding. _

_Well, it's fucking embarrassing, knowing she had me completely whipped like that. I never followed anyone's rules…I was my own man, a fucking badass who would have the world at his feet one day…and she took that all away from me. _

She'd stripped him of his free will, and to someone like Seifer, that was a fate worse than the most agonizing of deaths.

His ears perked slightly at the heavy trod of footsteps that rang out beyond his cell; he flicked a casual glance toward the figure that approached his guard, his hope flint on rock; just a brief spark that died swiftly when he saw how large a silhouette his guest cut. He'd known deep down that it wasn't Quistis--he'd come to recognize her step, and it was much softer than this one, clearly authoritative, but pressed much more lightly into damp stone.

_Probably Raij. _he thought, flinging an arm over his eyes. He couldn't face his friend right now; the last time he suspected the big lug had come dangerously close to breaking down, and that did little to suppress the occasional flare-ups of self-pity that flitted through him.

The footsteps rang out again after pausing a moment, and then, abruptly, silence enveloped Seifer and his cell.

His curiosity dug its sharp nails into him after a few minutes of the invasive quiet, and finally he removed his arm, squinting through dim illumination to identify his visitor.

Cid Kramer blinked back at him through spectacles Seifer remembered playing with as a small child. Garden's headmaster stared emotionlessly at him for several long moments, the two men contemplating one another warily, like animals circling before a territorial battle.

His weary sigh evaporated the pretense of impassiveness a moment later, and Seifer witnessed the man's face slump, every crease of age more pronounced than he'd ever seen them before, stress lines that fractured the skin like fault lines through solid earth. He looked as close to falling apart as Seifer felt, and the ex-knight prayed for a moment that he was better at hiding it then this former father figure.

"Quistis Trepe is a very proud woman." Cid began, looking off into the distance. "I think you understand this as well as I do."

_The hell is he trying to get at? _

"Last night…she came to my office and begged me. She begged me to remember a little blonde boy who used to chase fireflies down the beach and sneak pieces of cake outside to the hiding place he'd built. He was…the closest thing I ever had to a son, the same as the rest of them. Don't think I don't remember him, Seifer." Cid whispered.

Seifer kicked his legs over the bunk's edge and sat up, knotting his hands in his lap.

"Edea and I loved you very much. She loved you, right up until the very end of her life; I'm sure of that. I…I hated you for a while, right after my wife was murdered and I heard that you had done it. No…" he trailed off, shaking his head. "That's not right. I…_tried _to hate you, but I couldn't. I kept seeing that little blonde boy running down the beach in front of me…picking on Zell and Quistis with the childish innocence you lost a long time ago, sitting in Edea's lap and squirming during family photographs…" Cid's voice dipped to a feeble murmur. "My hands are tied, Seifer. No excuse I make, no plea I use…none of them can reason with a bloodthirsty public. They want your death, and they want it yesterday. But I…I can't do that to her. And I can't do that to Edea's memory."

Seifer digested that as Cid touched a hand to his forehead, the eyes encased behind their glass prisons--magnified to reveal every nuance of emotion that flashed inside the shiny gaze--shutting in powerless anguish.

He said nothing.

Cid calmed himself after a moment of choked-back sobs, and wiped deliberately at his eyes.

Why did people have to keep fucking crying around him? Couldn't they do it in front of someone actually skilled with handling that type of emotional breakdown? Zell, Selphie; hell, even Squall could probably deal more easily with it than he could.

He felt a familiar pain creeping into his chest, the one that had threatened to immobilize him during Quistis' surprising breakdown back in her dorm room days ago. He didn't want to care about these people--he'd cared before, for his mother, his father, his brother, and in the end they'd all abandoned him. He'd opened himself far more reluctantly to the orphanage gang, but in the end he'd loved them too--and one by one, they had inevitably left him as well.

And only he had bothered to cling to the memories of warm summer days and screaming gulls.

"You have a choice, Seifer. You can be saved--but you can no longer be Seifer Almasy. That's a hunted name now; Seifer Almasy will have to die in front of the firing squad. But the execution can be faked, and Garden has plenty of contacts that can furnish you with a new identity."

Cid clasped his big hands around the bars of Seifer's prison cell. "It's what Edea would have wanted…and Quistis as well, I believe. I never could deny either of them anything."

Seifer stared hard at his hands, fighting a rising surge of emotions that threatened to asphyxiate him beneath their deafening crash.

"You'd have to live another life, wear a disguise…but you could keep seeing her. We would enroll you as a new student at Garden. Think of it…as a chance to start over."

_You can't just wipe the board clean. _he thought bitterly. _Not with me. _

"Something's developed between you and Quistis, hasn't it? Don't you want another chance with her, an opportunity to-"

"No." Seifer replied simply, finally.

Cid blinked, taken aback. He lowered his hands. "No? No, there's nothing--"

"No I won't fake my death." the ex-knight declared, lifting his chin, the arrogant carriage so familiar to Cid that he felt his eyes well again--he'd worn that look years ago, as a child, that same expression of prideful stubborness crossing the features as it did now. It was an older, far more experienced face, but buried somewhere beneath the haggard eyes and scarred forehead, Cid could still make out the laughing boy.

"Seifer…why?" he whispered, tucking both hands into the pockets of the vest snapped tight across his blue shirt.

The green eyes flickered away for a moment, pensive, distant, but not really sad. Just…resigned. It was a look that curdled Cid's stomach more than any gaze of hopeless misery.

"Because I can't be anyone else." Seifer told him calmly.

_Not for anyone…not even for her. _

* * *

Cid Kramer's Office

Balamb Garden

She stepped into his office with heart in her throat, painfully hopeful and struggling to keep herself firmly grounded in reality.

The look on Cid's face smashed all Quistis' fervent prayers, the hammer that pulverized the stone hanging in the pit of her belly into fine powder.

She sank into one of the chairs sitting in front of his desk, her legs suddenly refusing to support her, hands gripping the edge of the table with white-knuckled urgency. She'd prepared herself for this possibility of course--in fact had pretty much expected it, but still it hurt far more than she would have ever dreamed possible, to know the words coming out of Cid's mouth before he even uttered them.

"Seifer faces the firing squad at 1800 tomorrow." Behind his glasses, Cid looked impossibly tired, and suddenly, delicately old.

"There's nothing I can do, Quistis. I've tried. I'm sorry."

She bowed her head. "I understand, sir. I'd just…"

"I know." he said quietly, folding his hands on the table between them. "So did I."

The clock on the wall behind him ticked away the final night of Seifer's life with cold indifference, oblivious to the fire that shot through her veins, a roar of heat that devoured all it touched with the greedy snatch of a starving animal.

She fought the irrational urge to yank it from the wall and slam it onto the sturdy wooden surface in front of her, stopping time as its glass front shattered and that awful ticking ended forever.

"Will you go see him again tonight?" Cid asked. "Say your good-byes?"

Quistis looked down at her hands, still clutching his desk as though somehow it might anchor her to this world, keep her from floating off into a black nothingness the way she wanted to. That nothingness held no pain, just a blissful oblivion that she would have welcomed at that moment. "Yes. Despite the things he's done in the past, he doesn't deserve this. He's not the evil monster most people portray him as."

"I know, Quistis." Cid said, very gently. "I'll call down and inform the guard that you're coming and to let you into Seifer's cell."

She blinked up at him in surprise.

"Please make sure he knows he isn't alone."

* * *

_He could see only whiteness for miles, fuzzy around the edges like an out-of-focus photograph. _

_She was the only blot of color against the endless snowy expanse, rising against the colorless nothing like a cautious flower poking its petals through heavy snowfall. Dressed in pink, the bright skirts flaring softly around her ankles as though touched by a breeze unfelt by him, she beckoned with a slender hand, smiling. _

_"Rinoa?" His confused question boomed loudly. He lowered his voice. "Don't tell me I'm fucking dead already." _

_"You're not dead, Seifer." Her voice sounded pleasant, musical. Wind chimes stirred by the fingers of an approaching storm. "Just sleeping." _

_"I thought Squall's were the only dreams you could fuck with; I've heard him complaining about it before."_

_"Usually." she sighed, holding out one hand to examine the nails painted a light peach and speckled with hearts. He felt like gagging for a moment, even in this state of nonbeing. "But these last couple of days I can stretch out farther, into other people's heads. I think it might be because of…her." _

_"So why get into my head? I don't want you here." he said pointedly. _

_"Bored. And scared." Large brown eyes glanced up at him from beneath quivering eyelashes. _

_"I'd pick someone else to bitch to. I'm not going to be around much longer." _

_"Me neither, probably." Rinoa said sadly. "I'm scared to die, Seifer. I was brave before, when I talked to Squall in his dream. But the truth is, I'm really, really scared." She sniffed, the big gentle eyes sparkling suspiciously._

_"You're not going to start crying, are you?" he asked warily. _I've had enough of that.

_"No." _

Don't ask…just tell her to get the fuck out of your head. You don't care, anyway.

_"Why aren't you going to be around much longer?"_

Ah, shit.

_"Because I asked him to kill me."_

_"Squall?" _

_"Yes. I don't want to die…I really, really don't want to die, but somehow…I don't mind as much if it's him." _

_"You want Leonhart to off you? He doesn't have the balls for that. Why the hell did you tell him to kill you, anyway?"_

_"It's the only way I can get rid of her." _

_He cupped a handful of the atmosphere swirling around him, surprised to find it almost tangible, like a heavy mist coiling from gray river water. "Huh." _

_"Are you afraid of dying too?" _

_"Not really." he answered honestly. "Can't say I'm exactly thrilled about it, but I've gotten used to the idea." _A long time ago, actually…

_"What about Quistis?"_

_"What about her?" he snapped. _Why the fuck does everyone keep asking me that lately?

_"You guys fell in love during those few months you were gone." _

_"You're out of your fucking mind. What the hell would make you say that?"_

_"I don't really know." Rinoa tilted her head curiously, sleek dark hair falling curtain-like over one shoulder. "But after Ultimicea escaped, and we were all on the beach, I just sensed…a closeness I guess." _

_"She's not in love with me. You're an idiot."_

_She ignored the insult. "But you're in love with her?" _

_"No! Dammit, you're fucking imagining things. And it's not like it matters anyway. Tomorrow a couple of people will shoot me a lot, and the world will finally be rid of Seifer Almasy. Hope there's a nice parade; I always wanted my death to be celebrated." _At least that way people will remember it.

_"It's not very fair that we didn't get longer, is it?" _

_Seifer shrugged, scooping more of his surroundings into the palm of one hand and watching it thread smokily between his fingers. "That's just the way it goes sometimes." _

_"Aren't you mad or sad at all? You had things to do with your life, right?" she asked, reaching out to lightly touch his chin. It was a tender graze of the fingers, cold and spindly little lengths of flesh that penetrated beneath his skin; not a romantic gesture, just one of comfort from one human being to another._

_Seifer jerked his face away and scowled at her. "I suppose." _

_Rinoa settled herself on the ground--if it could really be called that--and tucked her knees up beneath her jaw, resting a cheek tiredly against them. "What were they?"_

_"What?"_

_"The things you wanted to do." _

_"What does it matter now?" _

_"It matters to me." _

_"Will you leave me alone if I tell you?" _

_"Maybe." she stirred vaporous whiteness with her fingertips. "I just want to stay here for a while, though, away from her. I just want someone to be with me for a while longer, ok? I don't like being alone." _

_"You get used to it after awhile." _After awhile, you get used to being hated…until it all just kind of slides off your back, and there's a certain part of you that actually starts to crave it, that needs it.

_"So what did you want to do?" _

_"Dunno. Nothing specific, really. Tried the whole world domination thing. Didn't really work out." He paused, scratching absently at the nape of his neck. "I guess…I would have liked to see my mom again. My real one."_

_"Really? What was she like?" _

_"I don't remember." Seifer lied. _

_"Not even a teeny, tiny bit?" _

_"No." he snapped. "Stop pestering me." _

_"I bet she was really pretty. I wonder if you look like her or your dad?" _

_The old bitterness surfaced in him again, an anger that nestled deep inside, dragon-like in its vengefulness when prodded and awakened. "I don't have a dad."_

_"Everyone has one, silly." _

_He glowered at her. "I mean I had one, obviously, but he's dead to me." _

_"How come?"_

_"Hyne, you're fuckin' nosy." _

_"How come?" Rinoa persisted._

_"Because he was a fuckin' prick. You happy now? Hyne, how does Squall put up with you?" _

_One full bottom lip pushed out into an infantile pout; the expression somehow reassured him, reminded him of summer sunsets and innocent caresses, and the blush of first love thick across her pale cheeks. For all Rinoa's seeming grace and poise, there was still that hint of girlish childishness lying in wait behind her soft eyes, and that knowledge lightened the heaviness of his stomach. That she could retain her innocence and childlike wonder in a world like this, one that reeked of death and heroes fallen from grace--because once he really had seen himself as a hero--was a fragile, precious thing. The kind of thing Seifer Almasy never could hold onto or fully understand. _

_That was why she had ended up with Squall, and why he would die alone._

_"Hey, you put up with me too at one time!" Rinoa protested. _

_The sadness fled her eyes, and for one moment, Seifer saw the defiance of a misguided rebel burning there again, the same self-righteous flame that had led her straight into the welcoming arms of the Forest Owls, the one that scorched the irises when she talked about her father. _

_A twinge of melancholy ached in his gut. She had never lost the very essence of her soul, the core that made her Rinoa Heartilly. He'd dropped so many fucking pieces of himself along the way he was surprised there was still enough of him left over to stand upright. _

_She grew blurry in front of his eyes, a nebulous haze of pink that slowly bled away into their misty surroundings. "Hey, what's happening?"_

_She smiled again, the rebellious spark gone now, replaced with the same resigned sorrow he'd seen in Quistis' eyes a few days ago. "You're waking up." _

_"So what are you going to do?" he asked reluctantly after a moment, watching the landscape gather thickly between them, coiling upward like the flick of a cat's lazy tail, building a column between them. _

_He could barely see her now, and with a sudden stab of regret, Seifer realized this was the last time they would ever cross paths. It wasn't so much a lingering attachment to Rinoa that caused the thought to hurt, just a vague notion flitting through the back of his mind that someone like this, who offered so much brightness and warmth to the world, didn't deserve to die. _

_In the end, not many would really notice his absence, and even fewer would mourn it. _

_But Rinoa was everything to Squall. The stoic young man never vocalized his feelings--and especially not to his greatest rival--but even the blindest of idiots could see the softness in his face and eyes when he looked at her. The knowledge that they would be torn from one another sat wrong with Seifer, like rancid food that tormented the stomach. _

_"Good-bye, Seifer."_

_Her whisper chased him out of eternal white, pushing him from that monochrome sea into the dark loneliness of his reality. _

_* * *_

He awakened with a jerk to the sound of her voice.

Seifer recognized it instantly--he heard it even in his dreams now, and when he came hesitantly awake, he found himself still clinging to that articulate tone, icy sweet like the half-frozen petals of winter's last surviving rose.

It was downright cold now, hardened to demanding in a way he didn't often hear her speak. He'd always known Quistis to possess an inhuman amount of patience--the kind of tolerance he loved testing, pushing the boundaries until even her infamous cool burst into roaring flames. It fascinated him, even as he found himself infuriated every time his latest jab or scheme failed to provoke her.

"He's a condemned man who has been sentenced to death without a trial because of the prejudice and hysteria of the public; I think we can allow him a few comforts his last night."

"But I can't just let you leave with him, Instructor Trepe. If I open his cell, I could be court-martialed-"

"Headmaster Cid said he would call down with instructions to allow me into the prisoner's cell."

"Yeah, but he didn't say you could just _leave _with him."

Seifer heard the jingle of metal, keys knocking musically against one another, and, intrigued, climbed to his feet and wandered over to the front of his cell.

Quistis marched toward him with a large ring of keys in one hand, the steel loop nearly dwarfing her small palm, the twitchy young guard trailing behind looking nervous but too cowed to really protest her actions.

Seifer almost chuckled. Prim and lady-like, quietly aloof on the outside--pure defiant fire on the inside. He smiled despite himself, trying to forget just how glad he was to see those blue eyes cutting through layers of darkness just for him, the brightness of her hair scattering the shadows from his mind for just that one moment, like an approaching sun.

Nodding briskly to him, she bent her head to try a few keys in the lock of his door, going through half a dozen before selecting one that fit perfectly while the guard mumbled anxiously at her shoulder.

"I accept full responsibility for my actions; I promise the blame won't fall on your shoulders." Quistis told the young man as she swung the door open, handing the keys back to him.

Seifer remained where he was, arms crossed, brow heavy as he arranged his features in their usual intimidating scowl.

She didn't seem perturbed at all, but then she never had been scared of him.

One slender hand extended toward him--it was a lifeline thrown to a drowning man, pure and perfect and insanely, oddly beautiful to desperate eyes. "Come on, Seifer, I'm taking you back to your dorm for the night."

He found himself transfixed by the sight of those delicate fingers, white like Rinoa's but igniting slow-burning embers inside his chest the way hers never had.

"Seifer?" One of her hands touched his arm lightly, questioningly, and for that second he treasured that light pressure, trapping the feel of it close to his heart. It was something to take with him when he faced them tomorrow, standing tall and proud like a man, arrogant to the very end.

He unfolded his arms, and slowly, gingerly slid his own hand into her offered one.

"Instructor, you really can't-"

She cut him off mid-babble. "He'll wear a tracking device--I picked one up from the Training Center." Quistis held up a small band strapped with a blinking device, the kind of transmitter Garden used to tag the monsters used for training purposes in order to keep an eye on their whereabouts and movements. She clicked it shut around his wrist as she explained, her palm lingering against his forearm for a moment, cool, but somehow, incongruously, burning hot. "You can arrange to keep track of him yourself, if you want."

And then, with uncharacteristic gentleness, the woman separate from the soldier now, she took Seifer by the hand again and led him past the still mildly protesting guard, guiding him like a child gone astray from his parents out of the bowels of Garden.

Equally uncharacteristically, he let her do it, because he knew it was the last time she would touch him.

* * *

_"I'm sorry, Seifer. I really am."_

His mind watched her leave again as the shower's warm spray raked claws of heat down his back, furrows under the skin that stung like needles, painful but necessary, because it reminded him he was still alive, the skeleton still wrapped in his protective layers of skin.

Seifer closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the stall's damp wall. Beneath him, water and sweat and a thousand memories swirled together, sucked through the drain's ravenous mouth like they were nothing.

Maybe they really were nothing--to him, they were acid in the gut, throbbing heartburn, but once he disappeared, there was no one left to secretly cherish them.

That hurt more than he thought it would, to think that his brother's high-pitched giggles and her wide blue eyes no longer existed when his beating heart stopped--he'd thought, once, foolishly, that Jacob at least would live on forever through him, because no one could stop Seifer Almasy. He was untouchable, immortal--and so very, very stupid.

He opened his eyes again, staring bleakly at twirling water as it collected in a dizzying eddy between his toes, and then simply dropped away into oblivion. It was a strange ballet he stood watching, a fluid diamond dance beneath the dim gold of the bathroom's light.

Seifer didn't know how long he leaned against the shower's side seeing nothing and yet everything, but eventually he reached for the faucet's handle and shut off the now tepid flow. He stepped out of the shower like a robot, toweling off mechanically, a machine programmed to follow simple instructions without processing their meaning.

He cinched the piece of material around his waist and opened the bathroom door, releasing a cloud of steam that circled around him like ghostly manacles across the body.

He froze inside his room, the carpet soft under bare feet, reminding him of its presence with gentle, insistent scratches.

She waited for him in front of his door, looking uncertain, as though her legs had walked her down to his room, but the mind hadn't really arrived until now. Both hands clasped tensely before her, bracing Quistis for…something.

He didn't know what. Maybe she didn't either.

He padded across the floor to his bed and sat down, opening a drawer in his dresser and pulling out a pair of boxers.

Neither of them said anything, and she turned away respectfully as he dressed in a pair of loose gray pants, SeeD cadet training gear that she recognized instantly, old and well-loved judging by the faded color and worn material. "Any idea why you're here?" Seifer asked at last, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

"To tell you the truth…not really." Quistis admitted, still hovering by the door. "I suppose I needed to tell you again how sorry I am. I really thought I could do something. I suppose…" she paused, gathering her thoughts. "I suppose I've been as arrogant as I always accuse you of being, assuming I could fix everything simply because I'm Quistis Trepe. And you were the one to pay for my conceit."

He smirked without humor at her words. "There are some things even you can't fix, Instructor."

"I know. And I truly am sorry this is one of those things." She hesitated for a moment, waiting for a response to that, and when he just looked at her, she twisted her hands more tightly together. "I guess I'll give you your peace. You probably just want to be alone right now."

"…You can stay." he said, trying to be brusque about it, but sounding more pathetically hopeful to his own ears. _Fucking lame, Almasy. _

Already turning to leave, she glanced in surprise over one shoulder at him.

He found himself on his feet without really remembering when his brain had fired a command off to his legs, the arms crossed coldly again, a fragile barrier between her and the emotions crushing his chest into a rubik's cube knot of confusion. If he let go of that, just removed the restraints that he dropped neatly in place over all those feelings, would the subsequent rush drown them both?

"Oh. All right." Her voice held an atypical timidity. Where was the Quistis Trepe who dealt with death on a regular basis, who walked through stained battlefields of it with fierceness in the cold steel of her eyes?

It was a question they both asked themselves.

Talking with Seifer had never been difficult before. But now, Quistis couldn't think of a damn thing to say. There were no diplomatic words to repair this particular situation, no reasonable argument that would preserve the glow in that emerald gaze.

She wanted to hate him. She wanted to remember the Seifer who'd held the world at the tip of his gun blade and laughed while it died around him; she wanted to remember the Seifer who faced off against her with lunacy singing through each eye and movement, his hatred as palpable as the steel he swung toward her.

But Quistis could only see the Seifer who made her laugh, the boy and the man mingling once again, the green eyes bright with mirth beneath an unmarked forehead and then a scarred one, her own eyes picturing only the sorrow and not the madness behind hard jade.

He was still like that boy sometimes; pig-headed, lost, and very lonely.

"Seifer." Quistis whispered, shutting her eyes. "I don't know what to say."

He swallowed, and that simple move seemed to him the hardest thing he'd ever done. _I don't need you to talk. _"That's ok; you get boring after while. I had to sit through all your fucking lectures, remember?"

The gaze snapped wide again, and the annoyance fermenting there died swiftly. The words were certainly Seifer's; blasé, callous, completely oblivious to the sharpness with which they cut. But the eyes belonged to someone else again, not a killer or a madman, just someone struggling through the hardships of life like the rest of them, without the cloak of superiority that held him above everyone else.

She smiled, cautiously, beautifully, and this time it touched her eyes, the kind of smile that had always slightly taken his breath, even when he was just a student and she was that annoying teacher that just wanted him to be all he could--provided he followed her rules, of course.

There was no frantic passion between them this time when he--or maybe she, neither really knew--closed the distance and wrapped the other in a gentle embrace. Just two people holding on--and holding together--against the teeth of a violent storm.

* * *

Fields of Balamb

Balamb

The day Seifer Almasy died dawned gorgeously, sunrise painting a lavender masterpiece across the far horizon, peach accents highlighting the lightest scattering of freckles across his nose.

He stood like he'd always pictured himself when the end came; spine rigidly erect, shoulders back, eyes straight forward and burning with contempt while somewhere in the background a monotone voice droned his crimes to a watching audience.

He didn't look for her. Last night had simply been a kind woman offering what comfort she could to a doomed man in his final moments. Lying in his arms all night while he breathed the scent of her hair was Quistis' last sacrifice in his name, her duty toward her wayward student taken care of at last. She might have shown up, but he didn't want to see her--he didn't want to pretend to himself the way he had last night, that perhaps there was at least one other person who would care when the bullets shattered his skull.

Seifer would die facing the truth.

He stood motionless, arms tied behind him, gaze slanting up toward the majestic peak of Balamb Garden, its spires distantly breaking the skyline somewhere beyond Squall's back.

His old rival eyed him steadily, the gaze giving away nothing, inflexible like his stance.

Seifer felt a pang of regret looking at him. Oddly enough, if anyone were to kill him, he would have preferred it to be Leonhart. He and Rinoa were alike in that respect, he supposed. But at least he would have his blaze of glory, a long and well-earned death at Squall's skillful hands; there was no shame in falling to a worthy opponent.

His old rival nodded succinctly to him, an acknowledgement that Seifer accepted, and returned. Old hatreds and bitterness aside, there was a mutual respect between the two men that nothing had ever changed, no matter how much one might want to kill the other.

The emotionless voice had stopped talking.

Balamb's gently waving fields held an almost reverent hush, as though every life force around him, plant, animal and human, held its breath, waiting for the thunderous crack of firing guns, and the gasp of Seifer Almasy's last breath. He could see the firing squad take up their positions, but the entire scene was blurred to him, blacks and greens and the various colors of his spectators all blending together in an abstract artwork that rivaled the sky itself.

He could see threads of gold in the sky, and wondered after all if she'd come to watch him die.

The click of steel resounded in his ears; the explosions bloomed in his ears a split second before he found himself hammered by several terrific blows, their force driving him to his knees as the sky faded into the same white as the dream Rinoa had invaded.

Seifer was still looking up at that lilac masterpiece when the whiteness took over completely, and his fall toward the ground turned into forever.

She stood on the fringes of the crowd, toward the back of the little semi-circle that observed him, dressed in black with her hair flowing loosely down around her shoulders for once.

She'd pulled it back into a severe bun that morning, meaning to appear hard, coolly composed--but the hair style had revealed each crack in her icy mask, the flawless skin seemingly coming apart around the edges, the eyes exhausted and bleak. So she'd left it down after all, hiding behind that thick curtain before someone guessed that Quistis was not nearly as tranquil as she appeared to be.

On the outside, glacial calm; inside, a bitter, raging storm, the kind that rattled windows and peeled roofs from houses with its horrible shrieking winds.

Beside her, Zell remained somberly quiet for once; she didn't know how much he guessed about the storm inside her, but he knew something of it, judging by the protective arm he'd slipped around her waist. She was grateful for the gesture, even if it reminded her of another arm around her, one that would lay jumbled together with the broken mass of his body in another moment.

She'd thought, that after last night, she had the strength to face this, to acknowledge her failure and face it as haughtily as he faced his own death. But now, watching the awakening sun glinting in his hair, Quistis knew she'd been stupid, that the strength had really come from him. They hadn't done anything, just sprawled across his bed all night saying nothing, not sleeping, his arms around her, his chest pressed to her back as they each listened to the other's soft breathing. After awhile, once she'd memorized the rhythm of his heartbeat, Quistis supposed she had somehow deluded herself into thinking that come morning, she'd awaken from a really long, particularly terrible nightmare to find herself napping at her desk with Seifer launching spitballs into her hair from the back of the classroom.

He'd just been so…_real_. There was a human under that skin, under that skeleton, the kind with fears and desires and regrets, no matter how hard he tried to hide them.

And now…now she could hear gunfire, sliding cold and deliberate into her ears, like the deft flick of a surgeon's scalpel.

She turned away as his blood splashed the sky and flung tatters of red across the murmuring grasses. She couldn't watch anymore, because as he fell, the sky seemed to tumble with him, upending her entire world, turning it inside out the second she saw those green eyes slip closed.

* * *

Classroom C45

Balamb Garden

She listened to the clock counting out each excruciating minute of her day, and stared dully at the coffee mug cupped between both hands, stone-cold now and completely unappetizing.

Three weeks really wasn't that long. Quistis had explained that to herself over and over again, but in the end, she'd come to the conclusion that she was really just making excuses for herself. Three weeks…twenty-one days…five-hundred-four minutes…

Five hundred and four minutes after his death, she should have begun feeling again. But there was nothing, just this foreign emptiness inside of her where organs and the basic, biological needs of a normal human being should have resided.

She could see, out of the corner of one eye, her students eyeing each other and then casting significant little looks at her--they'd been doing that a lot lately, Quistis noticed. For the past three weeks, in fact.

Maybe it was because in those past three weeks, there'd been no reprimands toward unruly students, no lectures, no tests. Just a brief, clipped explanation before each assignment she handed out at the beginning of class, and then silence.

An awful, cloying silence that every student seemed to feel down to the marrow of their bones.

It was the same silence that echoed in her chest. She could hear it; it was a deafening quiet, the kind a soldier knows well, the kind that erupts right before the boom of firearms and grenades. It was poison to the nerves, eating away until they simply frayed, and snapped.

Her computer dinged at her, and she glanced from the coffee's brown sludge to its glowing monitor.

**MadMartialArtist84: hey quisty, check this out.**

Quistis sighed, and clicked open the tiny thumbnail image that popped up inside the instant messenger window. It loaded quickly, and an image of Zell wearing skimpy pink shorts declaring 'Too Sexy 4 U!' scrawled in loopy, cutesy white cursive across the ass flooded her screen.

_Oh Hyne. _

He looked so ridiculous between the outrageous get-up and his signature thumbs-up and goofy smile, that she felt the slightest bubble of laughter stir inside her.

Warmth--more than the awful coffee had ever offered--coiled briefly inside Quistis.

Her hyperactive friend had spent the past several weeks pulling numerous stunts similar to this, risking limbs and the wrath of Squall just to cheer her up. She was more grateful for him than he'd ever know, even if the naked T-boarding incident recently _had _scarred her for life.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Very nice.**

**MadMartialArtis84: man, you shoulda' seen the look on irvine's face! i made him take the picture. he said looking at me made him throw up in his mouth a little.**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: That's certainly an accomplishment to be bragging about. **

**MadMartialArtist84: eh, not really, but thanks for the compliment. **

Quistis shook her head, smiling a little despite herself. Hilarious, generous, clueless Zell.

**MadMartialArtist84: what are you doing after class, quis? i'm in the library right now--want to come help me look for more stuff on ultimicea? i found a couple more things, but i don't really think they're gonna' help. irvine and selphie are here too, btw. selphie says hi.**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Tell her I said hello back. Class will be out in about five minutes, but I've got a few things to do. I'll be by later this evening to do some research. Talk to you later, all right Zell? **

***SexyBlondeWaiting4U has logged out***

"Man, I was hoping to get her down here." In disgust, Zell swiveled away from his computer and planted his chin firmly on one hand, pushing off the floor with both feet and spinning wildly a few times. A little farther down the aisle, Selphie perched in a similar chair with book in one hand, reading as she flew backward toward the far wall of the library, propelled along by enthusiastic shoves of her tiny feet.

Irvine, sitting next to Zell at his own computer with feet propped on the desk in front of him and hat slung low over his eyes, shook his head. Sometimes he really wondered how he had ended up with Selphie when she and Zell were so blatantly similar. Maybe it simply would have been calamitous to combine that much energy, and both had somehow sensed that and gravitated away from one another. Still, he had to speculate sometimes how long Garden would survive with the two of them paired up.

"Well, I wouldn't exactly be rarin' to get down here either, if I thought _that _was waiting for me." Irvine drawled, pointing at the picture of Zell superimposed across the computer screen. "Seriously, Dincht. Can't you think of some other way to cheer Quistis up? Somethin' that doesn't involve you gettin' naked or borrowing my girlfriend's clothes?"

"I don't know what else to do. I've never seen Quisty so…_unenthusiastic_, ya' know? I mean, it's like she just kind of…stopped living or something when Seifer died. You really think something was going on between them?"

Irvine shrugged. "Don't know about that--only they know for sure--but that whole thing jest leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. The guy was cleared before, right? And then they kill him for stuff he didn't even do, without a friggin' trial or anything. Don't get me wrong, I ain't exactly Almasy's biggest fan, but I think anyone deserved better than that."

"Man, I hated him, but…I'm starting to think they shouldn't have killed him either. I mean, if Quistis saw something in him…maybe the rest of us were just missing something. She's smarter than any of us. You think maybe she knew something about him that we didn't?"

The cowboy's shoulders lifted again. "Hard to say. She won't talk about it, and it ain't like he's going to say anything."

"Yeah." Zell agreed, pulling his hand away from his face and resting it instead on his knee, drumming the fingers restlessly. "How do you think we should cheer her up? Take her drinking?"

"Dammit, I ain't diggin' you out of anymore dumpsters. Or rescuing you from amorous bikers." Irvine protested vehemently, his face clearing a moment later and laughter breaking between his lips. "Although it _was _pretty funny watching him trying to pull you down like that…"

"Yeah, yeah. It was friggin' hilarious, man. You know how long I had nightmares about that dude kidnapping me away in the middle of the night? There was this one I kept having where he showed up in my dorm room, right? And he had a wig and some makeup, and he pulled a knife on me and threatened to start cutting off important parts unless I put them on and did a sexy dance for him, right? So I did, because in the dream I was pretty sure he was actually going to start chopping stuff off; I had on this really red lipstick and I started busting out some stripper moves, and he was sitting on the bed watching me, and then I saw it go up, man."

Irvine blinked at him.

"You know, like what happens when you get happy?" Zell demanded, an are-you-with-me? expression contorting his features, both hands gesturing wildly now. "It was friggin' _huge_, and fuckin' Hyne, it was standing straight up. I'm not even talking half-mast; twenty cadets could have camped under his friggin' pants."

Irvine sputted several half-formed words before finally getting out an entire sentence. "For Hyne's sake!! Shut the hell up, Dincht! I don't wanna' know what kind of perverted stuff's goin' on in your tiny little brain! Does the phrase 'too much information' mean anything to you?"

"Hey, I thought we were supposed to talk about stuff like this! You know, things that bother us, that sort of thing."

"Who told you it was ok to describe other men's naughty bits to me?"

"Selphie said you were good with dreams. Like, reading them."

"Oh yeah?" _She's gonna' pay. _"Well, _don't _tell me about those kinds of dreams. Ever. Again. I don't care if you have to sleep with your light on for two weeks; jest keep the details to yourself, all right, Dincht? Think you can manage that?"

Zell scowled at him. "Lot of help _you _are."

"Find someone else to talk to about your boyfriend if you don't like my answer."

"Hey! He's not my boyfriend! I'd date Almas-" He broke off suddenly, the intended slight to Seifer dying in his throat as he remembered that the green-eyed blonde was no longer around to bear the brunt of his animosity. It seemed strange to Zell that he felt a pang of disappointment, when for so long he'd thought how much nicer the world would be without Seifer.

But in watching Quistis these past few weeks, he knew at least one person's world was not better--in fact, he'd go so far as to say that some vital part of Quistis, a vivacious highlight in the eyes, had vanished when those bullets tore through Seifer. He really couldn't stand seeing her like this; quiet with more than just a natural shyness, empty of her usual passion for learning and teaching. She was simply dead in the water, like a ship with all engines cut.

Between her and the dead-eyed, limb-dragging automaton that was Squall, Zell found even his unwavering enthusiasm dwindling, until he discovered himself voluntarily confined to his room during the middle of the day, staring upward at his ceiling pondering complicated thoughts of death and redemption. He wasn't used to such somberness, and it disconcerted him.

Was this what it felt like to be Quistis? Slogging through deep and introspective thought processes each and every day, without room for the more lighthearted topics he usually preferred to dwell on? How did she stand it? It hurt him like a bullet to the gut, one that tore through the protective layer of his skin to damage internal organs.

He hated to think Quistis might be hurting that badly.

"Hey, Dinct." Irvine nudged him in the side with a foot.

"Eh?" He jumped a little, startled to be jolted from his reverie so abruptly.

"You all right?"

"Yeah." Zell sighed. "Just worried about Quis. And I'm hungry."

Irvine rolled his eyes. "Holy frickin' Hyne, man, you jest ate."

"Yeah, like a half hour ago!" Zell protested, scowling. "And the cafeteria was out of hot dogs _again_, so I had to settle for a _salad_ and some fruit."

The sharpshooter shook his head, looking amused. "And you lived to talk about it?"

"Not funny, Irv. That stuff's like…_healthy_." He shuddered a little as the word slipped past his lips, saying a silent apology to his stomach.

Selphie went shooting past, the tiny feet going a million miles an hour, one delicate little hand waving cheerfully to her boyfriend as she zipped by, humming along off-key beneath her breath to some unknown tune.

Irvine smiled as she passed, shifting in his chair and resuming his bored scan of the library from beneath the brim of his hat. The warmth of her smile was a fleeting one, brief summer sunshine before storm clouds rolled in to blot out all illumination.

Despite countless hours of scouring books and various articles on the computer, they weren't any closer to finding an answer on how to purge Ultimicea from Rinoa. Honestly, at this point it seemed fruitless to Irvine to continue; he wouldn't throw in his hat now, not when there was even the most miniscule chance of saving her, but he didn't know how much longer he could take of the awful hope that culminated in the pit of his stomach each time some promise of new information presented itself. It was a horrible anticipation, because each new lead inevitably dead-ended, leaving them all drained and disappointed.

And Squall…each time Irvine saw him, the poor man looked a little more pale, a little more drawn, and a lot more tired and hopeless. Keeping residence day and night at Rinoa's bedside must be doing a number on his sanity.

"Oh shit!" Zell blurted suddenly, lurching to his feet, knocking his chair flying.

"What?"

"Shit, shit, shit! I forgot I was supposed to meet this guy down at the training center to help him with a couple of throws. Fuck, I'm really late too; he's gonna' kill me. Hey, you wanna' take over here? Please? I've been telling this guy for weeks I'd help him out with some stuff. Come on, man, please?"

"Take over what? You want me to take pictures of myself in Selphie's clothes and send them to Quistis?" Irvine drawled. "Sorry, but I don't think I have the hips to carry off those shorts the same way you do."

"Ha ha, funny. I _mean _keep looking at these websites I have up, ok? I didn't get to read through them all the way."

"Sure." _For all the good it will do._

"Thanks, man! I'll make it up to you later!" Zell hollered over one shoulder, already sprinting toward the library door.

Irvine watched him go, shaking his head. With a loud yelp, the energetic martial artist just barely avoided collision with another student, swerving around him at the last moment and barreling straight through the door into the hall beyond without slowing.

How everything came into place for Zell when he was fighting, each jigsaw piece of coordination, balance and agility snapping snugly together, Irvine would never know. Stick the man in the middle of a battle and he became a whirling dervish of deadly motion, beautifully fatal with every punch and kick. Expect him to run the few feet from his closet to dorm room door and you'd most likely find yourself scraping him up off the floor, bewildered and bruised.

_A walkin'…well, _trippin' _contradiction. _

Dutifully, Irvine removed his boots from the desk, adjusted his hat, and set to work.

* * *

Beach

Matron's Orphanage

Three days later, Quistis found herself standing in the gentle grasp of crimson-stained turquoise, looking out at the sunset.

It was a beautiful thing, the sun, Quistis mused, but fickle. Not unlike life itself. It climbed to its summit each day only to disappear hours later, throwing its worshippers into the cold harshness of midnight, defeated sometimes even during its peak by just a few strategically-placed clouds.

The sun had been shining on him when he died.

Not like this; not this bright cherry blemish across the waters in front of her, clotted gore that rose and fell with each crash of the waves nibbling at her feet. That at least would have been apt, a perfect match to the blood that sprayed from his veins. No, that day the sun had painted him in a soft, pastel beauty that had yet to vanish from the darker corners of her mind. The emerald gaze, set, determined, touched with paint strokes of mauve and peach. The lightly tousled hair, highlighted in ocher and pink.

She settled herself on the beach's still-warm sands, watching the sea dart playfully over the tips of her boots, then surge back from her toes, like a child playing tag.

Not long ago, they'd stood here, together, in Rinoa's alternate reality, before plunging back into Time Compression. She remembered his clothes billowing around him, the white shirt and the khakis rolled up to the knees, flecked with grains of sand that winked like droplets of gold at her.

_"And be happy, ok?" Rinoa whispered, scrubbing a tear from the corner of one eye. Still smiling, she reached out, and Quistis felt delicate fingers close around her own--replaced a moment later by the large, callused presence of Seifer's palm. She glanced down to find them holding hands, focusing on that union of flesh as the beach suddenly flared brightly around them all, a flash of illumination that blinded her. _

His hand had been…almost real in that hallucination or whatever one wanted to call it. There, but not quite. A phantom limb, pressed into her own. She wandered if hers had felt the same way.

But the real thing…she'd felt that too, and it had been…wonderful. Warm and strong and alive, his pulse like a caged bird beneath the wrist.

Quistis leaned back, reclining onto the sand and shutting her eyes, concentrating on the sensation of waves rolling over her up to the calf, that stinging bite reminding her of one more sensation he wouldn't ever feel again.

_"And be happy, ok?" _

_You always did that so easily, Rinoa. _Quistis thought, not accusatorily, just with a touch of wistfulness for the young sorceress' innocence. _You were never really a soldier; you never grew up understanding death, or wading knee-deep in it. So you could be happy with Squall, and think about forever. _

Unfortunately, forever didn't exist. It was a nice idea, packaged in the childish beauty of fairy tales and peddled to the masses as something actually within reach.

Quistis knew better. Forever hadn't existed for Seifer, nor did it wait patiently for any of the rest of them.


	14. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**

Squall Leonhart's Office

Balamb Garden

If enthusiasm for living determined life expectancy, then Squall was already dead.

_"Do you remember what I said a long time ago? That if it's you, I guess it's all right? I told you I wouldn't mind if you had to kill me." _

Her words formed a ceaseless tune inside his head, like a hard-up musician beating the same mediocre song to death over and over again. A death dirge that grated on the nerves, dragging itself through the veins like a hot coal punted through his body.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her, whispering those same awful words over and over again, until they wrapped him like a deadly noose. He napped fitfully now, trying to limit himself to short, twenty-minute intervals here and there. He wouldn't have even taken those brief respites into slumber, if his body didn't demand it, because even those fleeting cat naps brought her, bearing her urgent messages of death and disappearing time.

He could never do what she wanted him to. Not even to stop Ultimicea.

Not even to stop Zell's ceaseless humming.

His jaw tightened dangerously as he sat at his desk with chin cupped in one hand, his blonde friend seated across from him--well, not really seated, more like…_seizing_--murmuring something off-key beneath his breath. Squall loved Zell like a brother…sometimes, but couldn't he sit still and shut the hell up just _once_?

Then again, he supposed that was exactly what brotherly love was all about; willing to give your life for the other, even though at times you wanted to be the one to take theirs.

"Man, Quisty's _late_. That never happens. I'm worried, man." Zell blurted, his hands drumming loudly on top of Squall's desk now in rhythm with his humming.

The pencil in Squall's hand, creaking stressfully as his fingers tightened murderously around it, snapped.

He stared at its broken pieces, the cheerful pink of serrated wood extremely out of place against his callused palm, and suddenly felt like crying. Would Rinoa break just as easily as her gift, if he cleaved his gun blade through her the way she so desperately wanted him to?

"…She's been acting so weird lately. Ever since Seifer died. Don'tcha think, Squall?"

Garden's commanders rubbed his temples. He said nothing. Honestly, he wasn't exactly sure who Zell was talking about, as he'd tuned out right after the martial artist's announcement of Quistis' tardiness. He presumed, then, that he was still speaking about the blue-eyed instructor, and if that were the case, then no, he hadn't really noticed any strange behavior. Then again, he was far too busy keeping vigil over Rinoa to notice anyone else--Galbadia probably could have mounted a full-on assault against Garden, while he remained in the protective bubble wrap of his despair, dead to the fatal melody of battle.

His door opened quietly at that moment, admitting the slender young woman, who did look a little paler than normal, Squall noticed. Fatigue scrawled itself blatantly across her eyes, a weariness just shy of the desolation he confronted each morning in his mirror.

"Sorry I'm late. One of my students had a few questions about her assignment."

Zell, mouth hanging open--at least the humming had stopped, thank Hyne--snapped his jaw shut, then unhinged it again to blare his latest well-thought-out observation. "You look like shit, Quis! You ok?"

_This is why you never get any women. _Squall thought, shaking his head.

She shot him a look that held equal parts amusement and annoyance. "Thank you, Zell. Don't worry about me. Sleep has just been a little elusive lately, that's all."

_I can relate. _He felt a pang of understanding sympathy toward her. "All right, now that you're both here, I-"

"Here, Quis, take my chair." Zell offered generously, leaping out of his seat and rocking forward onto the tips of his toes, shadow boxing his way across the office as Squall collected his temper once more.

She complied as he began speaking again, tucking loose hair behind her ears in a move he remembered well from his days as her student. She was a good teacher, Squall reflected idly, kind and patient but always wielding a firm control over her classroom. _Until Seifer opened his mouth, anyway._

That thought flayed open his ribcage as well, laying bare a wound still surprisingly raw to the touch. Seifer had always been one of the most insufferable bullies he'd ever encountered, and even after the war, with some of his arrogance scrubbed forcibly away by Ultimicea's poisonous touch, he'd still been the me-first asshole Squall would never forget. He was the kind of presence one got used to after a while--it was never one you particularly liked or looked forward to seeing, but all the same, the expectation of encountering those stern green eyes nested deep in Squall's chest, until he felt almost…disappointed every time he rounded a corner in Garden's halls to confront only empty space.

"Squall?" Quistis prompted gently, and he came back to reality with a start.

"I have a SeeD mission for both of you." he said blandly, refusing to acknowledge his space-out of a moment ago. "FH is requesting a couple of SeeDs to take care of some monsters that have migrated there recently. They've been snatching animals for the past couple of weeks and are growing bolder; last night one of the fishermen's daughters was attacked down by the docks."

"So it's just a regular clean-up mission, then. With all due respect, Squall, I have classes to teach. I'm sure some of the cadets who just passed their SeeD exams would be more than happy to prove themselves--"

"No."

Zell paused mid-strike, startled out of his routine of punches by the strictness in his friend's voice. He scratched the back of his head. "What's the big deal, man? Juat a' couple a' monsters. Quis is right; anyone could take care of that."

"I want the two of you on it."

Quistis remained silent for a long moment, lips pressed tightly together, before glancing down at the hands lying in a knotted jumble in her lap and sighing. "All right. At least it shouldn't take very long. I assume you've already found someone willing to substitute for me, then?"

"Yes."

"Hey, what about me?" Zell cried in protest. "There was supposed to be a new shipment of hot dogs coming in from Esthar today! They're made from some different kind of meat and seasoned 'with a hundred different-'"

"It's all right. I'm sure I could easily take care of this myself." Quistis interrupted.

"Standard operating procedure is to send at least two members of SeeD on any mission."

"FH doesn't know that. If I need any help, I'll send for it." _As much as I love Zell, I'm not sure I'm up to his company right now anyway. A little time away from Garden…from all the memories…might be good for me. _

Maybe she would at least be able to sleep again, without the distraction of expecting to find him snickering rudely behind his hand while he goaded Squall during one of her lectures. She could picture such a scene so clearly it hurt sometimes; it hurt badly, like a sword dripping flames shoved through the center of her chest. And the pressure of his arms around her while they danced, just two regular people carried aloft on the strains of tinkling romance like any other couple, that hurt too. In fact, Quistis had never known anything could hurt so badly. She wished the numbness would return, because then the weight of his arms would no longer matter, while that sword ripping its way through each of her internal organs simply vanished into nothing.

Nothing, the same way he was.

To Quistis, he'd been something. She didn't know exactly what, but he'd certainly been something. Now there was no Seifer, no fallen knight, no cocky student, just a slowly decomposing body six feet under. Now there was nothing.

She wondered if insects had devoured those beautiful eyes yet.

"I'm perfectly capable of handling this alone, Squall. You know that."

His sigh was a thin, whistling thing, seived through clenched teeth. Looking at him, Quistis felt sympathy brush saccharine fingers through her veins. Hyne, she wished there was something she could do. He looked so defeated, despair thinly veiled by the forced nonchalance of the penetrating gaze. He was like a man slowly dying inside, eaten away from within by rot until it at last closed its rancid roots around his heart.

She smiled gently at him.

He remembered that smile. It was the one she'd worn long ago, when she'd slipped lithely through the infirmary's door after his battle with Seifer, the one that had earned him the scar across his forehead.

He rubbed that scar now, thinking about gun blades crashing together in a jarring duet like ringing bells.

"All right. Let us know if you need any help."

She nodded. Zell back-flipped in hyper celebration, then froze as he sprang out of the move. "You sure, Quis? I mean, don't bite off more than you can chew just 'cause I was bitching."

"I'm not. Don't worry, Zell; I'll be fine. This shouldn't take me more than a day or two. And if anything happens, you'll be the first to know."

"Mm'kay, Quisty. I'm gonna' go check and see if they have the hot dogs in already!" He bounded across the room in two strides, planted a sloppy, brotherly kiss on her cheek, then blasted out the door, slamming it resoundingly behind him.

Squall shook his head.

"Do you think he'll ever get rid of all that energy?" Quistis mused.

"I doubt it." Squall replied flatly. "The boat taking you to FH will be at Balamb's docks in about an hour."

"In other words, 'you've outstayed your welcome, good-bye.'" She didn't say it with any malice, just a hint of the good-natured teasing he recalled her using on him as a somber-faced seventeen-year old.

He softened slightly. He really did love Quistis; she was the kind of big sister any man could have felt proud of--brave, smart, pretty…admirable all around. If not for Rinoa, maybe he would have even fallen in love with the young instructor somewhere down the line.

But Rinoa would always be first in his heart now--and his blue eyes would always be secretly mourned because they weren't green, he suspected. "Good luck, Quistis." Squall said softly as she turned to leave.

She looked back over her shoulder, a puzzled line sketching itself between her brows.

_That's a bit odd. This shouldn't be anything difficult, from the sounds of it._

Not really knowing to say, Quistis simply replied "Thank you, Squall," and slipped out of his office.

He spent a long time staring at the door after she left, holding the shattered remnants of his pencil the same way his body just barely restrained the splintered pieces of his soul. _Good luck, Quistis. _

* * *

The dock was a solid comfort beneath her feet, just barely swaying in time to the gentlest of waves as they lapped around ancient wooden pilings, a monotonous rhythm that reverberated softly through Quistis' body, like fingers rippling tenderly across harp strings.

The moon swelled overhead, a giant pearl dimpling black sky.

She watched the stars for a long time, loneliness playing its usual haunting sonnet inside her head, a poignant music she could just barely hear; it reminded her, strangely enough, of the song she'd danced to with Seifer.

_Stop thinking about him. _she scolded herself, coiling Save the Queen in one hand and turning away from the moon. It was probably the moon that had brought on such thoughts in the first place. The silver illumination played strange games with her eyes, sketching out ghostly silhouettes on the dock's edge, green eyes burning like brands through the darkness while the soft flapping of a long coat scratched through her ears. They were glimpses of sound, sight and memory that Quistis was used to by now, but nevertheless she turned forcefully away from them, because they hurt too badly to linger on.

Sighing, the young woman seated herself, scowling as a few splinters caught the seat of her pants and swinging both legs over the side, the tips of her boots sending out little circles of distubrance where they touched down. She hated this piteous rehashing of him, and knew he would have loathed such sentimentality himself. Basking in the memory of his emerald gaze while staring at a starry night sky, the strains of their song forming a maudlin background? He'd have probably shoved her off the dock and then held her under until she stopped struggling.

_I do miss you, though, Seifer. Sometimes I don't know why; you were a huge pain in the neck, a thorn in my side for years; anyone would think I'd be relieved to finally be rid of you. Once, I assumed I'd be relieved too. But I'm not. I wish you knew that. _

These past couple of days found Quistis with far too much time on her hands--at least at Garden she had the brief distraction of handing out assignments, or late night trips to the Training Center, or even Zell's latest stunt that usually ended in humiliation for him and yet another headache for Squall. Here, she'd failed to catch even a glimpse of these so-called monsters terrorizing the small town despite several forays into areas where sightings of them had taken place, and since most of FH's citizens were more concerned with their fishing than the presence of one quiet SeeD, that left Quistis a lot of time to herself.

And to him.

She traced her fingertips idly along her weapon's length, the rush of cool leather beneath skin a distant sensation.

Seifer had been…an enigma. And Quistis loved the challenge of a puzzle, something she could really wrap her mind around, analyzing each angle of it until she could be certain she had solved it.

She had never solved Seifer. She had tried to, first as his teacher and then as his…companion, or however he had classified her in his own complex mind. Garden's most problematic pupil was an impossible code, a tangle of intricate symbols like the twisting helix of a DNA strand. Quistis could have known him a thousand years and barely even skimmed the surface of the real Seifer Almasy, she knew now.

He'd been…forceful, even brutish, but those violent hands had touched gently, too, until they were barely a whisper across the skin and the heart. The green eyes, deadly, predatory and unbelievably hard, had contained a lonely vulnerability too. The sensuous lips spewed such cold abuse, but grazed her own mouth so warmly.

Too much confusion; too many contradictions, too many what-if's. Too little understanding or compassion for a man obviously hurting on the inside but afraid to show it, but most of all…too little time.

Quistis cupped her chin in one hand and stirred the water beneath her with a boot. It gathered in a whirlpool of ebony blue around her feet, a vortex that threatened to suck her down into the maw of the ocean.

She thought about letting it for a moment; the cold of the water would at least give her the numbness she craved.

_SeeDs do not pity themselves. _she lectured sternly. _Death is part of life. Even Seifer's death. _

_But, _another part of Quistis whispered, _it was so…unnecessary. He was murdered because of the prejudice of some people who never had to go where he did, and never even thought to give a second chance to someone who might have deserved it. _

A low rumbling broke through the maelstrom of her thoughts.

Instantly stiff with awareness, Quistis clenched Save the Queen and slowly rotated her head to the right, where the noise originated. Crouched on its haunches, spittle flecking its wide jaw in diamond specks of saliva, a gigantic mound of fur snapped its teeth a few times in her direction as a warning. Looking at it, Quistis guessed it probably easily reached seven feet standing on its back legs, each thickly-muscled limb tipped in massive paws boasting claws as sharp as bird talons.

She felt a slight prickle of anxiety along the nape of her neck. For a moment, before the solider took over and sealed Quistis Trepe firmly away in a distant corner of the mind for when she was useful once more, she wished she had brought Zell along. Very faintly, she could swear she heard Seifer's voice, dripping surprise and irritation.

_"Shit; that thing's fuckin' huge! Let Leonhart get chewed on by the damn thing if he wants to get rid of it."_

Quistis scrambled to her feet as it charged.

She had just a moment, a split second window of opportunity that she automatically took, Save the Queen flicking out and splitting one of the beast's eyes right through the center, its wail shrill and angry in her ears as its bulky form smashed right into her.

Pain--white hot and all-encompassing--shredded through Quistis, stealing the breath in one angry gust from her lungs a moment before she impacted water, and sank, deadweight that settled easily into the sea's serene embrace.

He saw her whip land first.

It whistled down from above and struck the water, sending up a plume of foam that stung his eyes, liquid shrapnel that burned the irises.

_Shit! _

Her body followed a second later, smashing a crater into the previously calm ocean, the distressed churn of waves hitting him, one after another, pushing him back against the pillar he'd used as a hiding place ever since the brisk tapping of her boots across the dock interrupted his late-night swim.

For a moment, he swore he saw her hair drifting lazily across the water's surface, golden seaweed that vanished beneath the moon's light carving silver pathways across the ocean.

He pushed off the pillar, gashing his palm on a jagged piece of wood, and dove.

Under foam-capped waves, the world was entirely different. A dark, alien wonderland, it swallowed him whole, pewter-glazed turquoise stringing itself along the corded outline of his arm mucles, lightning bolts of illumination across the skin. The glimmer of sealife winked at him from the depths here and there, bright like shooting stars and vanishing just as quickly. The briny water shoved fire into the cut on his hand, but it was a dull pain compared to the pressure in his chest.

He couldn't see her. God damn fucking Hyne, he couldn't see her, and she was going to drown while he drifted here useless and sick to his stomach.

A flash of paleness caught his eye; his heart thumped back to life and he stroked toward it, pulling hard with each arm.

She was weightless, like a very small child, when the ocean pushed her into his waiting arms.

And pale, so very very pale, the lips like powdered rose dust from a dead and withered flower, sapped of all but the faintest blush. He wished he could see her eyes, because with them closed, it was all too easy to imagine her dead.

His head broke the surface a moment later, and he inhaled noisily, kicking with every ounce of strength in his body toward the dock, cradling her against the front of him, pouring everything into that frantic swim when he realized he couldn't feel her chest rising and falling against his own.

_Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit! _

The monster that had forced her over the side was gone now; maybe it just didn't like water. He didn't really fucking care; all he really gave a damn about at this moment was seeing those eyelids flicker, and open, the mouth parting in that little smile he liked to think of as just for him.

He heaved her up onto the dock, less gently than she probably would have preferred had she been conscious. Hauling himself up after her, he rolled Quistis onto her back and leaned over the prone young woman, tilting the head up and back with one hand on her chin and the other on the forehead.

Then, he lowered his mouth to hers, and prayed.

He could still feel the pulse beating sluggish and unsure in the side of her neck, thank Hyne. And she hadn't been under that long--just a fucking eternity, was all. He knew less than a minute had passed, but it still stretched on like forever to him when he recalled fumbling through that black water for her, panic eating holes into the lining of his gut.

Time turned into forever again while he waited for her eyes to open, each passing moment increasing his heart rate while hers stuttered and slowed. If he could have lent those extra beats to her--hell, he'd give all of them, what did he need with them anyway--he would have.

His hands framed her cold face. Callused thumbs streaked gentle, damp paths down her cheeks, leaving trails of wetness that mimed tears. It was a terrible sort of beauty the waxen, still face held trapped under its surface, veined with ribbons of silver and the false tear tracks traced by his thumbs.

She was so damn beautiful, even now. He'd never seen anything more beautiful; he never would again, the young man knew. And it was dancing just beyond his fingertips even now, taunting him with its nearness while it faded ever farther into the background. But he could understand that, and didn't loathe its retreat; he never had been allowed anything good.

He'd never deserved it.

She could feel his hands on her cheeks, and through a dark, watery haze, Quistis could just make out the blurry outline of a man's face.

Nausea, collecting in two separate waves inside her gut, crashed together while she tried to piece together the fuzzy sections of those features. She shot upright, spewing water, a geyser from the mouth that splattered his shirt and lips.

"Aww, fuck." Quistis heard him say, and even through the fog that enveloped her brain, she realized the voice was a familiar one. She grasped for it, but it slipped, elusive like a butterfly, through the clench of her mind, fluttering off into the night sky above her head.

Then his face loomed right over hers, their noses almost grazing, and the hands gently cupped her cheeks once more; she knew those hands. Warm, beneath the glaze of ocean they still carried, and rough--the hands of a laborer, or a soldier--but gingerly light against her skin, almost as though she might break if they squeezed too hard.

She closed her eyes again.

"Hey! Don't you fuckin' go to sleep on me!"

_"Shit. Trepe, don't go to sleep on me. Quistis? Open your fucking eyes."_

His name clicked neatly into the jigsaw puzzle that was his identity.

"Seifer?"

* * *

_"I dreamed…I dreamed you were dead." _

A dream…

_The day Seifer Almasy died dawned gorgeously, sunrise painting a lavender masterpiece across the far horizon, peach accents highlighting the lightest scattering of freckles across his nose. _

No…that hadn't been a dream. She, Quistis Trepe, had watched him die with her own eyes; she could still picture every single detail of that moment, seared into her mind forever, like a brand sizzled into livestock.

_He stood like she'd always pictured him when the end came; spine rigidly erect, shoulders back, eyes straight forward and burning with contempt while somewhere in the background a monotone voice droned his crimes to a watching audience._

_"…Seifer…You're back…I'm…so happy…"_

But he wasn't back when she came fully awake; he wasn't anywhere.

She was alone on the dock with the gulls shrieking overhead and the ocean carrying out its tedious, neverending assault against wooden pillars while the sun burned the tender strip of flesh between sections of hair, parted precisely down the middle.

What exactly then, had been the dream? His death, or the rescue last night?

Quistis rolled slowly to an elbow, assessing herself. She hurt all over, the feeling not unlike being run over by a truck, and when she touched her belt, she found Save the Queen missing. The attack, at least, had been real. But he couldn't have been; she remembered his death clearly, remembered Balamb's fields running red with his blood as something broke open deep inside her, creating a fissure that could never quite be healed.

She adjusted her clothes, stiff with salt from her unplanned swim.

How had she gotten herself up here, then? If someone--if he--had rescued her, why would they just take off? Why just leave her here, alone, as she had been this past month?

An irrational anger began to creep through her. Alone--she was always alone. There came a point when a person got damn sick of it, when rage poured itself like boiling magma through the veins and exploded in a fiery starburst of sensation inside the chest. She choked on that heat now, forcing it back as it crawled up her throat, denying its release until eventually it gave up, and plunged in dizzying freefall into her stomach.

It formed a giant knot, and froze, scabbing over the wound of his death.

But not enough; it left sections still open, still rankling, and thinking about him being so close, the way he had been--or hadn't been, probably--last night hurt so badly she wanted to curl helplessly into fetal position.

_Dammit…_

Quistis buried her face in her hands.

She made a pathetic sight, a young woman wearing the bedraggled look of a drowned rat, sobbing quietly into salty palms while the morning blazed in cheerful contradiction overhead.

_"Squall?" _

_He buried his face in her hair, nestling deep, as though those raven strands could form a protective cage around him if he burrowed deeply enough. Like living vines, they slithered over his face, a distant perfume tantalizing his nostrils. _

_He'd lock _her _in that damn cage, if he thought it would help._

_As it was, right now he wasn't sure anything could help. _

_"Squall." She pulled gently away from him, and when he finally looked at her face, she was wearing that smile again, the one that existed only for him, the one he always pictured during the most trying moments of his life. It was that smile that kept him going sometimes, that smile that turned a horrible day into a bearable one. _

_It was the smile he would have to do without soon, if she had her way. _

_"Squall, I need you to do it." Rinoa whispered. _

_Sitting in their meadow beside her, sunset embellishing its grasses with soft pools of crimson and rose as it had so long ago, Squall shut his eyes. _Not this again. Rinoa, please…just let us enjoy the time we have left, the only way we can.

_"Squall…Squall, please. You have to. If she gets out again, I don't know that I…I don't know that I can stop her." Thick with tears, her voice trembled. "Please; this is the best way to make sure nothing happens, ok? I promise I'll forgive you." _

'I promise I'll forgive you…' You keep saying that. But how would I forgive myself?

_He reached for her hand where it lay between them, still wearing his engagement ring like a miniature sun. _

Let's just sit here. Without talking. I don't want to talk anymore. I just want to be with you.

_"Squall…"_

_He turned his look on her, the one that demanded no nonsense, the disciplinary eyes that expected just as much from his subordinates as he did from himself. But she was not his subordinate, and her kindness would never outweigh her determination. _

_She took her hand from his, and he felt the loss so deeply in his chest he feared his heart had actually been torn from the ribcage, leaving just a gaping hollow behind. _

_But his stubborness had always matched her own. _

_"No!" he yelled, flinging himself around into her arms, crushing her against him until both of them could hardly breathe. _

_It was the only word he spoke. _

_She wept as he held her, silent tears because she knew how much the sight of her crying hurt him, and he hardly needed anymore agony piled onto the already teetering stack of his emotions. Hyne, she loved him so much; if she could just have a little more time with him…_

_But that could put her friends, and even him, at risk, and she couldn't do that. _

_So, sniffing quietly, Rinoa wiped her eyes, and stooped slightly to pick it up from where it lay concealed in the rippling meadowland. _

_She pressed it into his hand, and saw his eyes grow heavy with the weight of knowledge, the same way his fingers drooped beneath its steel length. Very gently, Rinoa extracted herself from his arms, and stepped back, studying him for one long, last moment as he stared dumbly down at his gun blade, held limply at his side like something hated._

_"I love you, Squall." _

Her words followed him into reality, as tangible as the screams that burst into horrified life just outside his office.

He jolted awake, and, feeling cold weight across his lap, looked down in horror to find Lionheart lying naked and gleaming across both thighs.

_"Squall…Squall, please. You have to. If she gets out again, I don't know that I…I don't know that I can stop her." _

_Rinoa…Rinoa, do you have any idea what you're asking me to do? _

The screams repeated themselves, high-pitched but with a distinct masculine tint to them. Squall flung himself out of his chair and lurched toward the door, launching it open with a wrench of one arm, dropping into defensive posture as his door swung wide to reveal an empty corridor.

Empty…save for Zell, sprinting wide-eyed and breathless toward him, hair whipped into even more disarray than normal. Squall felt his heart lurch into his boots, taking a step toward his friend, expecting for a moment to see the entire Galbadian army rushing after him.

"Squall! Squall!" the martial artist panted, collapsing into a loose heap at Squall's feet. "Cafe…teria!" The word came in short bursts, machine gun explosive as they rattled from his throat.

He went cold.

Zell began to climb tremulously to his feet, staggering against the wall as Squall blasted right through him, Lionheart swinging at one side as he sprinted down the corridor. The drumming of his boots matched the staccato symphony of his heartbeat, pumping blood through each ear in a deafening rush until he could hear nothing else. He could see only her, limned in white brilliance, jets of diamond light that fountained from every pore of her skin, raining down around Garden's cadets like deadly shooting stars. It had been a fatally beautiful display, forked lightning that tongued its way beneath his fluttering lashes right before the darkness hit.

_Where did that come from? _Squall wondered idly, seeing the picture so clearly in his mind it might have been a recent memory, and yet he knew it was not.

He hit the cafeteria doors at full speed, charging right into the middle of its usual lunchtime rush, turning heads all across the spacious room with his raucous entrance. All activity ground to a halt as a confused buzzing swept through the lunchroom, startled gazes taking in the Commander's wide-eyed, disheveled appearance, the young man standing rigid and ready for battle in the center of polished tiles.

With Lionheart extended before him, he swept his eyes frantically around the room, searching for her familiar, lithe form, straining for a flash of sleek black, the soft curve of lips he knew as well as his own…anything.

There was nothing. Just pools of artificial light, captured in the tiles beneath his boots in curtains of white-gold that sluiced over each foot, and the shaking of his terrified hands.

"Squall!"

Zell stampeded in behind him, stopping to catch his breath just inside the entrance, hunched over with hands resting on his knees while he waited for his lungs to stop hitching so erratically.

The dark-haired young man swung around toward him with a quizzical look.

"The…the hot dogs!" he exclaimed brokenly, his features so twisted with grief that Squall felt his stomach drop again, until Zell's words hit him a moment later. He followed the trembling line of his friend's finger, aimed at the main serving counter, over which was hung a sign painted in sloppy black letters reading _All hot dog shipments delayed for the next two months. _

Squall slapped an open palm to his forehead. _Hyne. _

"Two months! Two friggin' months! They can't do that, can they, man?! You're Garden's Commander--tell 'em to give me my hot dogs, right now!"

"_This _is what you dragged me out of my office for?" Squall interrupted, voice bland as usual, but holding a dangerous edge of steel that had Zell easing slightly away.

"Well…I didn't really _drag _you out. I mean, you just started running." He scratched the top of his head. "What was that about anyway?"

Squall just shook his head, sheathing Lionheart. "I can't _make _them keep shipping hot dogs to Garden, and even if I could, I've got a lot more important things to worry about."

"My health isn't important? The joy of my life isn't important?!"

_Not that you're overdramatic at all. _he thought, sarcasm glittering darkly around the words, his head giving a brief shake again. There came that urge to rip his gun blade free and just swing with all his might at Zell's head again…Honestly, the hyper young man was lucky he had his clumsily charming moments, or Squall suspected someone would have snapped and killed him a long time ago. Probably him.

Or Seifer.

He pushed that thought away; he didn't need memories of the ex-knight pushing their way to the surface again, shoving dark little tendrils into the corners of his soul like poisoned roots. They were the kind of roots that seemed never-ending, like the foundation of Balamb's oldest tree, and he didn't have time to patiently dig them out.

The door slammed noisily behind the two young men, whipping them both around to confront a winded Bria Jaycen, who at the moment looked just as panicked as Squall assumed he probably had when he first burst into the cafeteria. Strawberry blonde falling in golden-red sheets across flushed cheeks, she stumbled forward into Zell, who caught her around the waist, looking startled but not at all displeased about getting his arms around the young medical assistant.

"Bria!" he said, shooting an anxious look at Squall while she summoned her next words.

"Squall…I was going to your office when I saw you running in this direction, so I followed…Squall, Rinoa's gone."

He felt that same coldness icing over his veins again, black pond water that hovered just above freezing sloshed through the body. His weapon felt suddenly, unbearably heavy against one hip, weighty like the solid lump of his heart.

_She pressed it into his hand, and saw his eyes grow heavy with the weight of knowledge, the same way his fingers drooped beneath its steel length. Very gently, Rinoa extracted herself from his arms, and stepped back, studying him for one long, last moment as he stared dumbly down at his gun blade, held limply at his side like something hated._

_"I love you, Squall." _

For a long moment, he could only stare vacantly at her, seeing black hair instead of her cherry flaxen strands, and brown eyes less round than the ones currently perusing his face. "Gone?" he repeated dumbly after a long stretch of silence.

She pushed off Zell and stood up straight, smoothing out her lab coat. "Gone. I'm sorry; I don't know when it could have happened. I was leaning over her, checking the machine, and the next thing I knew, I woke up on the floor, and her bed was empty."

_"Squall…Squall, please. You have to. If she gets out again, I don't know that I…I don't know that I can stop her." Thick with tears, her voice trembled. "Please; this is the best way to make sure nothing happens, ok? I promise I'll forgive you."_

"Shit, man! You don't have any idea where she went?" Zell asked, hooking both hands behind his head and giving Squall another worried glance.

A sudden explosion shook Garden down to its very foundation, throwing Bria back into Zell's arms and staggering Squall up against one of the walls. A few screams rang out, followed by the concussive bang of several trays hitting the floor.

Squall shoved Zell out of his way again and hit the hall running.

He headed toward the main entrance with Bria and Zell just behind him, and barreled straight into a billowing gray hell of putrid smoke, pouring from the crumpled ruin of the front gates, coiling lazily around the bodies of a few students standing too near the initial blast. The scent of death hit him hard, like an uppercut to the jaw, and behind him he heard the jagged coughing of his companions.

_No…oh Hyne no…_

Squall glimpsed her slender back, and the cascade of long hair glimmering briefly, mockingly at him before disappearing around a corner.

He pressed his hand to Lionheart's handle; it was an automatic movement, a familiar action he always did without thinking whenever the instinctive warning bells clamored inside his head, as they did now. It was a soldier's reaction, cold and detached like a machine going nonchalantly about its business.

But Squall was a man too, and that part of him made him release cool steel, and charge ahead weaponless into the chaos of lower classmen running in blind panic toward the smoking crater of the exit.

 "Rinoa!" he screamed. He hadn't meant to yell out like that, but her name tore itself from his throat anyway.

It was a tortured scream so full of pain and suffering anyone listening to it must have cringed.

Zell followed again, shouting for Bria to get back to the infirmary. He heard her boots clomping alongside him a moment later and knew she hadn't listened; he just prayed she just wouldn't get hurt in whatever chaos broke out.

It happened a moment later, the roar of a T-Rexaur newly freed from the Training Center splitting Zell's eardrums, the thundering approach of its gigantic body quivering the floor beneath their boots with each booming footfall. It rumbled directly toward him, several grats buzzing to either side of his head, another roar whip cracking through the air.

"Bria, get back!" he yelled, darting forward to take out one of the grats with a jarring punch. It dropped at his feet, buzzing feebly. 

The Rex's tail whisked past overhead, missing her by mere inches as she ducked beneath the attack, looking scared but not wearing the full-blown panic he'd expected. She was visibly nervous, but her mind had not yet skittered off into disorientation, where terror immobilizes the muscles and halts all rational thought. 

"Get back!" he yelled again, spinning and backfisting the other grat into oblivion..

Zell dodged under another thrash of the powerful tail, but its backswing caught him across one shoulder, hurtling him sideways into the base of the stairs leading up to the elevator. He rolled away from the lethal stomp of a massive foot and flipped back onto his feet, sprinting over to her as soon as he regained his balance and clamping one hand firmly around hers.

Towed along behind him for the ride--because he knew that the T-Rexaur's flesh was far too thick to take much damage from bare fists--she ran determinedly, her palm sweaty against his.

They dashed along Garden's main corridor, chased by the thunderous report of its pursuit, Briat stumbling at one point and actually going to a knee for one heart-rending moment before he got her back on her feet and running steadily beside him again. He'd never known so much adrenaline could invade one person's system without simply exploding out of them; it burned bitter metallic on his lips, Zell's heartbeat a cannon in his ears.

"Squall!" he screamed, spotting the dark head a few feet in front of them, battling several grats and a snow leopard, Lionheart glinting with each deadly flash of movement.

He leapt in a surge of lean muscle, cutting the final grat in half and decapitating the snow leopard in one smooth stroke. Zell dashed, panting, up to him, pushing Bria off to one side as Squall swung around to face the T-Rexaur.

"Hey man, you junctioned?"

"Yeah."

Honestly, he shouldn't have even needed to ask. Squall and Quistis were two of the most prepared people Zell had ever met.

 They were beautiful to watch together, Zell distracting the monster with dazzling combinations that penetrated the thick armor of its skin just enough to drag bellows of pain from its dripping jaws, Squall following up with mighty slashes of Lionheart that severed tendons and bulky muscle. It was a gorgeous symmetry they shared, working in perfect unison until, in only a minute or so, the beast lifted its head for one final braying call, swayed drunkenly, and finally crashed permanently onto the floor.

"The garage!" Squall yelled over the sounds of battle swirling around them as more of the Training Center's occupants spilled out into the main hall of Garden, motioning ahead of him with Lionheart as he took off once more.

They fought their way through a few more creatures, Squall and Zell making short work of them, before reaching the basement-like coolness of Garden's garage.

Bria found herself still latched onto the martial artist's sweaty hand as they spilled out into the room's shadowy corners, the strength in that palm bolstering her as she found herself--like some irrational child--afraid of what lurked for them in the darkness. He gripped her more tightly as well, and she felt his anxiety transmitting itself through the union of their fingers. Perspiration stood out in gleaming beads across his forehead, catching the faint glow of the emergency lights overhead.

She noticed Squall had sheathed Lionheart again.

If it came down to a fight, they wouldn't win, Bria knew with dead certainty. Fighting prowess notwithstanding, Zell couldn't defeat whatever Rinoa harbored inside her alone, and Squall would never turn on the woman he loved like that. Not that she could really blame him, but if he didn't--if he laid down his blade and refused to take up arms against her--they were all dead.

She popped up almost out of nowhere, nearly giving Bria a heart attack, her fluttering pulse tripling until she expected it to beat its way right out of her neck. The pink lips curved in a cold and emotionless caricature of her smile, the kind not many could resist, the one that had completely enamored Garden's rigid and apathetic Commander.

"Rinoa." She heard the raw pain in his voice, and even in that moment of horror, her heart broke for him.

"Hello, Squall." the black-haired sorceress said in a voice that was hers, and yet not. "It's nice to see you again."

 The eyes flashed pure mahogany ice. Black crept in around the rim of each iris, spiraling in toward the pupil like slowly crawling mist.

"Rinoa." His voice stuttered. "Please. I know you're in there somewhere."

"It's too late, Squall." The lips curved again, cruelly this time. "You waited too long."

Then she spun, and with an outstretched hand, blasted the door clean off its tracks with a powerful fire attack, walking with such regal grace toward a cluster of sheet-draped vehicles that Bria expected to see her actually float above the dirty pavement.

"Rinoa!" Zell screamed, dropping her hand and rushing the young woman.

She barely even looked at him, the pale hand extending again, a gust of icy wind ripping him off his feet and slamming him back into the far wall. He slid down it, groaning, as Bria screamed, the shriek breaking itself into a million pieces and embedding itself under the skin.

Squall moved toward the sorceress, and Bria grabbed his elbow, holding him in a surprising vise grip that jerked him back a little.

Rinoa yanked the cover off a gleaming motorcycle, and kicked a leg over it.

"No!" he yelled, breaking her hold and tearing toward his fiancé as the bike growled to life beneath her. Exhaust kicked up into his face, its stench watering both eyes, prompting an arm in front of his face until the smoke cleared.

When it had dissipated, she was already gone, roaring down Balamb's twisting roads toward the coast.

Squall jerked into action like a marionette snapping free of its strings, clearing the cover from another bike with one frantic sweep of his arm.

Zell, helped to his feet by the young medical assistant, limped toward another machine of similar make, roughly pulling the cover off that one too as Squall ran to the cabinet holding the keys to every vehicle in Garden. He swiftly punch in a long code, snatched two sets of keys, tossed one to Zell, and vaulted onto his own motorcycle.

He revved the engine once, twice, then screamed off in an explosion of exhaust that choked her with its reek.

She looked wide-eyed at Zell as he jammed his key into the ignition and scrambled onto the seat, twisting at the waist to flash her a hasty thumbs up over one shoulder.

"Don't worry!" he yelled over the roar of his vehicle, and then he too was gone, in a rush of noise and motion that left her huddling against one wall, coughing.

The wind dug tears from his eyes, scratching itself like untrimmed nails across each iris.

Squall ducked lower over the bike's gas tank, tightening his fingers on the handlebars until he heard the pop of his knuckles. The wind howled banshee-like through his clothes and hair, attempting to rip him right off the seat.

With his heart beating itself like an enraged animal against the cage of his ribs, he could barely hear the motorcycle's ceaseless purr.

Or his own voice, scratchy with horror and roiling dust, shouting her name over and over again as though he no longer wielded any control over his vocal cords. It was a strange and depressing irony that this moment in time was probably the most he'd spoken in his entire life.

Rinoa's hair rippled behind her, a dark flag taking flight into the sky, the sound of it flapping through the air playing odd games with his nerves. He tasted blood and bile, mixing together in a nauseating batter that reminded him of a failed cooking experiment by Quistis when they were children. It was a strange flashback that entered his mind, and Squall had to wonder what the hell was wrong with him. Had the horror of these last few minutes completely torn apart his mind? Had he finally gone as crazy as Seifer had once been under the command of Ultimicea?

The air moved with an unbearable chill beneath his skin.

He watched her twist at the waist through horror-stricken eyes, those slender fingers flickering toward him, fire curling from the tips and coalescing in a giant globe. Squall shoved down hard on the right handlebar, his reflexes swerving him out of the way just in time, the sizzling amalgamation leaving a comet trail of sparks behind it as it crashed into the road behind him, gouging out a huge chunk of pavement.

Zell, just a little ways behind him now, hit the brakes hard as the road erupted into flames before him, skidding to a halt just a few feet away.

Limned in those orange tendrils, Squall resembled some sort of god, rising on the crest of a blistering ocean that snapped and popped with bright menace.

He wasn't quite sure why he started running; his feet merely began moving, and he didn't resist, dodging the flames and scrambling into soft meadowlands, using that adrenaline pumping itself like liquid mercury through his veins.

It seemed centuries ago that he'd run through this same field with Seifer and Quistis at his side.

He blasted through the sight where Seifer had died; he remembered its exact location, because that day had somehow branded itself into his memory. The grasses still seemed--to him at least--to hold the memory of the ex-knight's final moments, tinged with the faintest of brown hue that represented dried blood.

Another explosion turned his attention toward the road. Cement winged toward him, missiles that pelted the arms and embedded themselves in one cheek. Zell cried out and stumbled, pain stinging the area of flesh just below his tattoo; he saw a trickle of red slither down onto the front of his shirt, spreading wide across the material like a crimson teardrop.

Squall, hunched low over his bike, swept through the destruction.

Squall touched the Guardian Force sealed away at the back of his mind awaiting release, awakening it from its deep slumber.

Shiva came awake with the sound of shattering ice, the beautiful woman forming into solid matter over his head, rearing back with slender arms thrust overhead. He felt sick summoning her, corroding nausea scattering through his gut, but Ultimicea had to be stopped somehow if they were to save Rinoa, and he knew Shiva's attack alone couldn't be enough to severely damage either the sorceress or his fiancé. He just prayed it would chip away enough of the magical armor shimmering around her to slow the presence inside Rinoa.

A split second before Shiva's attack impacted, Squall witnessed the back of Rinoa's motorcycle fishtail, as though its rider had stomped too forcefully on the brakes. It whiplashed from side to side now, completely out of control, and in what seemed like slow motion, his entire world grinding to a halt, fixated on that moment, the motorcycle slammed onto its left side, trapping Rinoa and dragging her along beneath it.

Throwing up sparks as it slid across the pavement, the lightning storm of violent contact between road the steel highlighted her face, clenched in agony, the mouth thrust wide in a silent scream.

_No! Leave me alone! Get out of my head!_

Rinoa heard the snap of breaking bones. She screamed, but the sound was lost, either in her own mind or the roar of the machine pressing her fragile body into solid ground. The skin of her left arm tore, exposed muscles gaping at her from between two serrated edges.

_Stop fighting, little bitch. You can't win. I'll kill him. _We'll _kill him. _

_No! I can hold on. I'm not your slave. _Her words broke with the effort of speaking them, even though she never opened her mouth.

Fire blasted again from her fingertips as she skidded along, flaring in alternating spurts from her hand, first in thick jet streams that singed her nails, then in skinny ribbong that she could barely even see as Rinao struggled desperately for the reins of control. Ultimicea was stronger than she ever would have imagined, but still she held on to the smallest sliver of free will, grasping it so tightly she thought her body might just fly apart with the effort.

The bike spun to an eventual halt.

With Ultimicea's strength, she flung the heavy piece of machinery off her.

She got shakily to her feet, still fighting for dominance, the rumble of his approaching motorcycle buzzing through her ears.

With Ultimicea's hatred, Rinoa lifted her hand again, tears streaming down her face.

And with Rinoa's love, she flung herself abruptly in front of his bike before he could stop in time, the screech of tires and the sickening thud of flesh the last thing she would hear.

* * *

Jeb's Diner

Fisherman's Horizon

She ate slowly, and without much enthusiasm.

Since her hallucination of a few days ago, Quistis found herself as listless as she could ever remember, sluggish like Zell after a huge meal. But hers was a lethargy that would probably last much longer, since his tended to last only as long as it took him to regain his appetite, which wasn't long at all.

The loss of her weapon cut her more deeply than she would have imagined. It would be a pain to replace it, but it could be replaced--physically at least. In the seven years she'd wielded it, the whip had become as much a part of herself as an arm or leg, an extension of her body. Each nick hacked into the leather, each tiny imperfection was the mark of a battle well fought, a memory she could point to and remember with either pride or faint melancholy.

It was a little like losing her best friend, and she reflected for a moment on how sad it was that an inanimate object was the closest thing she had to a best friend.

_Oh well. _Her fault, Quistis supposed. She had always kept up that icy barrier even with those closest to her; it had warmed over greatly for them, but still there was that little piece of herself she kept buried, because even she was too afraid to really examine it closely.

Seifer could have probably dug it up, if he'd had the time. He'd been capable of a lot of things no one else could have accomplished. Getting under her skin had been one of them, and by the time she'd realized that once in a while, it wasn't so bad having him around, he was already gone.

At leash she knew now that whoever had coined the phrase 'you don't realize what you had until it's gone' was a damn genius.

The young man behind the counter leaned his elbows on it, flashing her a smile. "So I don't think I've ever seen you in here before."

_Ugh. Was that a line?_

Quistis offered him a polite smile, even though she really wasn't in the mood to make small talk with the man.

He had strong, handsome features beneath a scruff of dark beard, shining curls corkscrewing off his head in soft coils that looked touchably smooth, with a pair of turquoise eyes that had probably fluttered more than one young woman's heart. Not to mention the hearts of a few older women who probably should have known better.

But sitting there looking at him, she felt simply neutral. There just wasn't room in her for interest at that moment.

"I'm not from around here, actually."

"Business of pleasure? Well, I can't really imagine anyone coming to FH for pleasure. There's not much here." he chatted, swiping a damp rag across the counter. "And after awhile, you get tired of fishing.

She smiled courteously again. "I can imagine."

"So you're a fishermen, then? I mean, you don't really look like one, but…" The young man shrugged. "Well, why else would you be here?"

Quistis took a sip from her water glass, and finally pushed her plate away. She'd only consumed half of her meal, but she already felt full. "I'm a SeeD, actually, from Balamb Garden." Her presence here wasn't a secret by any means, so she didn't see any harm in telling the truth. 

"Oh yeah! Think I heard something about that. You're supposed to be cleaning out those monsters people have been spotting, right?"

"Yes. Although so far I've only come across one."

He shrugged again. "Maybe there only is one, people have just kind of automatically assumed there was a nest of them or something like that. Probably just a little paranoia; I mean, this place is usually pretty quiet, so any kind of upset gets a lot of attention, you know?"

 "I can imagine." she replied, thinking how redundant and lackluster she sounded. She assumed he would get the point, but he was either too thick to realize how detached from the conversation Quistis really was, or too arrogant to believe that there was actually a woman in existence uninterested in talking to him.

"Well, I've enjoyed talking with you, but it's really time for me to get going." she lied cordially.

 "Hey, my shift is actually ending about right now; you mind if I walk you out? I just need a minute to let Chris know." He jerked a thumb vaguely behind him, indicating a pair of doors leading into the kitchen. Teeth flashed in a friendly smile. "I promise I'm harmless."

Quistis withheld a sigh as something tickled the back of her brain; it was just an ever-so-faint sensation, one she couldn't really pin down as anything tangible, but there nevertheless. "All right; I'll wait."

"Great! Back in a sec, I promise." He disappeared through those doors while she wrestled with the idea of just leaving. But her manners were too deeply ingrained, and when he returned she was still waiting, hands clasped in front of her as though to brace against something unpleasant.

He smiled at her again, and she realized he hadn't offered his name. She didn't really care; in all honesty, she preferred to get this over with as quickly as possible. She should have taken a page from Seifer's book and just brushed him rudely off. 

Quistis slipped through the front door before he could do the gentlemanly thing and hold it open for her. He didn't need anymore ideas than he probably already had, for Hyne's sake. Why did she always attract the persistent ones? What was wrong with good old-fashioned awkwardness and a complete and utter terror of the opposite sex? She knew plenty of young man like that at Garden. Of course, most of them were Trepies, who were just as annoying as the more brazen types in their own way, stalkers from afar, always just out of her line of sight but undeniably there.

Above them, gunmetal clouds churned like liquid steel, a graceful ballet of silver and murky charcoal. It was a sky that matched her mood, one that called to a similar darkness aching inside her chest.

He turned violent as they slipped past a vacant alleyway; Quistis snarled expletives at her own stupidity as he got a hand around her neck and swung her into the alley's crawling shadows, shoving with such force she crashed into the back wall, bruising her elbow. She stumbled and fell to a knee, heart thudding sickly in her ears, fear a malignant tumor in the mouth, one that swelled bitterly against the lips. He'd brought her here to rape her for Hyne's sake, and she'd walked right into his trap, and without the whip that was almost a part of her own body.

Her worst nightmare grew limbs, and wrapped itself around as she kneeled looking up at him, thinking how broad his shoulders were. Helplessness was a soldier's poison, the venom that leaked through adrenaline-fired veins, acid poured into an open wound. She felt the burn of it now, and forced herself to focus, siphoning her stampeding thoughts into a narrow pinpoint that centered only on him.

_You are not helpless, even without Save the Queen. _Quistis lectured herself. _This man is not going to rape you. You are not a victim. _

Quistis' muscles coiled beneath her; like a wary animal, she waited, watching for him to make the first move.

Instead, he crossed his over his chest in a sullen pose that suddenly struck as as so Seifer-like that Quistis lost her grasp on her concentration, piece of it crashing like downed aircraft at her feet.

_Stop it, Trepe! You can't allow him to enter every single thought you have. You can't honor his memory like this, alone in an alleyway beaten and raped half to death because you were too busy thinking about him rather than using your training._

The man advanced forward a step. "I told Leonhart to leave me the hell alone. The fuck are you doing here?"

That voice jabbed from between his lips like a thousand spears, piercing her everywhere a split second before she crashed into him, her body already instinctively in motion the moment he stepped toward her. Quistis twisted automatically as she brought him down, banging his head roughly on the pavement beneath them, jamming an elbow into his throat and pinning him under her.

She froze as he blurted out a string of curses that could have only come from one person. 

"No."

She hadn't even realized she'd said the word out loud until he rolled an eye to look at her, scowling and rubbing the top of his skull. "The fuck was that for, dammit?! I didn't mean to push you that hard. Did you have to split my fucking head in half? And could you get your knee out of my balls, if you don't mind?"

_No._

This was ridiculous; her hallucination was progressing too far; she was now, undoubtedly, certifiably insane. She'd have to turn in her teaching certificate; she couldn't possibly set foot inside a classroom again, not when her delusions reared themselves inside her head like this, unfurling the giant wings of a dragon and fanning flashes of lunacy into the farthest reach of her body with each powerful flap. For a moment, Quistis could swear she even heard the ripple of leathery flesh, stretched wide to accept the phantom whistle of wind through each of those wings.

_That wasn't even his voice. _she argued with herself.

That was true enough. It hadn't been his voice, not quite. It wasn't the same timbre, not quite deep enough, and yet the tone itself was familiar, the kind she remembered him using when he kicked over her sandcastles and called her a crybaby.

"Trepe?"

His face blurred drunkenly in front of her, and before she could stop herself, Quistis cocked a fist and punched him soundly in the jaw.

His head rocketed back against the ground once more.

"Ow! Shit! Goddammit, Trepe!"

The tone was a roar now, and it couldn't belong to anyone else.

Quistis fumbled her way off him, clutching the ends of the jacket she wore tightly around herself as the wind tried to tear away that one final link to sanity. She burrowed into the material so desperately her nails actually opened little slits along it, backing against the far wall as he stiffly got to his feet.

"Next time you punch me, you want to hit like a girl instead of a truck?" He rubbed his jaw angrily.

"Seif…Seifer?" Quistis whispered, one hand lifting involuntarily to her mouth.

The look on his face changed gradually from stormy anger to something softer, hard to identify because he'd never really worn that look before, and because the features studying her were still alien ones, trying to confuse her with their strangeness even as deep down a part of her knew this was her former student.

He turned his head to the side, and spit something into the palm of his right hand.

"Yeah." The voice was undoubtedly his now, every nuance of it so right that it brought surprised tears to Quistis' eyed.

"Seifer--Seifer, you're-"

"Fuckin' Hynbe. Puberty Boy didn't tell you, did he? I thought you were here to harass me."

"How? How, Seifer? Your face…"

"Wig and makeup. This shit itches, too." he complained, scratching at his forehead as though to emphasize the point. He looked almost awkward standing there facing her, his hands eventually falling to both sides as though he weren't sure what to do with them, the eyes watchful and guarded beneath the unfamiliar curls. She watched his lips quirk as though preparing to speak, then grow still again, and it was then that she realized just how loud silence really was. 

It was a sonic boom in her ears, noisier than any battlefield tune Quistis had ever heard.

"Seifer, I-" She snapped her mouth shut, then opened it again. "That was you down at the docks the other night. I wasn't hallucinating." _That's not what you want to say to him! Tell him how much you've missed him! Let him know that, contrary to what he probably believes, someone actually cared that he was gone!_

He jammed his hand in the pockets of his pants, looking disconcertingly uncomfortable. "Whatever. Don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

"That's Squall's line." Quistis snapped, flaring from stuttering and hesitant to pissed in a startled heartbeat. "You've been alive all this time, and I never even knew. Do you realize--I thought I'd gone crazy, seeing your face over me like that after that thing knocked me into the water. Seifer, do you even know how--" _How much I've missed you?_

"The fuck do you care anyway?" he snapped right back.

"You know I cared!" Quistis screamed, the invisible cords which had always kept her control neatly in check, like bundled firewood, snapping cataclysmically now. "I always cared, Seifer! You were just too busy wallowing in self misery to realize it! You were too busy bitterly enjoying all the hatred directed toward you to think that maybe not everyone hated you! Maybe there were some of us that felt a piece of us die when the bullets began falling, Seifer." Her voice had dipped now, nearly to a whisper, but infused with just as much fervor as her yelling of a few moments ago.

He looked away. "I fucking missed you too." Seifer murmured as that silence stretched into eternity again, so quietly she barely caught it. "I don't know why, because you're the bossiest pain in the ass I've ever known and every time we're together sooner or later I know you're going to get on my nerves with all your self-righteous shit, but…" He shrugged, clenching his jaw.

Then, to her surprise, after glancing toward the street for signs of movement, he reached up and peeled off his hair, revealing the golden down she remember so well, matted beneath the wig's weight but his. Next, his hands set to work on the smooth forehead, ripping off sections of faux skin to revel the ridged puck of the ex-knight's scar, wig and latex film dangling from either hand now as he stared at his feet.

When Seifer finally looked up at her again, Quistis swore for one earth-shattering moment she saw something potent and meaningful glinting in his eyes, just for her, but that was an illusion gone so quickly she scolded herself for ever imagining it.

He set the items carefully on top of the dumpster behind him, handling them like fragile glass in that super-charged moment.

Seifer crossed his arms again, glaring balefully at his old instructor. "What, no welcome back kiss?"

Hyne, how she wanted to. In that moment, Quistis felt a relief so palpable she wanted to throw herself into his arms with what she believed cheesy romance novels described as reckless abandon. But she couldn't do that, because if she flew into that embrace to find it to be just some magic of the light and eyes, she didn't know if she could survive that. He seemed as brittle as ages-old parchment to her in that moment, liable to crumple to dust at a single careless brush of her fingertips.

The moment stretched, like the rubber band of her sanity, but clumsy reunions were not as durable as her mind.

The look in his eyes vanished as a gentle rain began, streaking his face with artificial teardrops that transformed him into some tragic young hero.

She didn't stop him when he began slipping his disguise back on, nor did she protest when he turned away and left without saying anything.

There was nothing left to say.

* * *

She floated in a blissful cocoon of ignorance, deaf to all but the melodic swish of water and the far-off rumble of thunder. Even her thoughts lay jumbled messily on the dusty shelf of her brain's I'll-get-to-you-later section, forgotten in that moment where only she and the sodden weight of her waterlogged body existed.

Arms stretched wide in a lazy fan, Quistis fluttered her bare feet indolently, propelling herself gently across the ocean's surface. Clear now, the sky laid out its gem-like display of stars with artistic care, each one reflected in the water, encircling her in a diamond-laced net of black. If that net were to snag her and suck Quistis down into the sea's cold embrace, she thought she might actually be ok with that; in this moment of tranquility, she was all right with anything. It was normally a dangerous placidness that enveloped her, the kind of lethargy that got a soldier killed, but after all that had taken place within her life in such a short period of time, Quistis figured Hyne owed her a couple of unguarded moments. And if He didn't see fit to grant them to her, well then too damn bad.

She heard the clomp of approaching boots parading their way across the dock, and squeezed her eyes shut, clenching both hands, as though she could physically grasp the strands of serenity that slithered away from her. Her struggle lasted a good minute, long after the footsteps had stopped, before she finally sighed and opened her eyes, staring up into a familiar emerald gaze.

He looked like the old Seifer now, the wig, latex and even beard gone, only the expression unfamiliar as he peered up into the night sky. The pensive look sketching his features replaced the usual brooding one, reminding Quistis just how beautiful a man he really was.

She righted herself in the cool water and began treading it. "That's a tad unwise, wondering around wearing the face of a dead man, don't you think?"

He didn't say anything.

"Seifer." Quistis prompted.

"I told you that shit itches. I like to take it off whenever I can."

"Even if it means endangering your life?"

"Stop teachering me to death for Hyne's sake, Trepie." His voice sounded less antagonistic than usual; it held more exhaustion than anything, and she tried not to think how vulnerably wounded he seemed to appear in the moonlight. "I come down here every night without that shit on, all right? So just relax."

She kept her mouth shut around a retort. _Rude as always._

When she glanced back at him, her simmering temper under control once more, he was half-undressed, his boots lying in a pile at the edge of the dock, shirt already off and the buckle of his belt undone.

"What are you doing?!"

He gave her a look. "Going swimming, like I do every night. I don't see your name written anywhere, Trepie, so you'll just have to share the water with my undeserving body. Got a problem with it, then you leave. _Instructor_."

"Why do you feel the need to act so nasty toward me?" Quistis demanded before she could stop herself as he slid almost noiselessly off the dock and plunged into the calm sea a few feet away from her. 

He surfaced a moment later, shaking water from his hair, splattering her with the droplets. "Maybe because for an intelligent person you're so damn clueless sometimes."

Quistis blanched. "What is that supposed to mean?"

Seifer ducked behind one of the dock's sturdy pillars, hooking his fingers casually over a cross section of wood just overhead. Gilded in watery turquoise light, she could see every detail of him, and the sight actually hurt her, a physical pain in the chest that she imagined must resemble a minor heart attack. 

Still watching her, he shut his eyes, her image seared across his retinas.

"Why are you here?" she tried again a moment later.

"I told you, I'm going for a swim. I've done this every night for the past couple of weeks."

"You know what I meant. How did you get here…"

"Alive?" Seifer finished for her. "Ask Puberty Boy about that."

Quistis digested that a moment. "Squall saved you."

"Yeah. Go figure. Guess he figured I'd come in handy somewhere down the line. Ultimicea's gonna' need a lapdog again when she's finally taken over Rinoa."

"Don't say that. Rinoa wouldn't let her do that." Quistis replied, feeling sick even as she tried to reassure herself. 

"You don't have much of a fucking choice, Instructor. She consumes people. It's what she does; she eats you up inside until there's just a fucking skeleton left, and then she moves on to the next person. It's what she'll do to Rinoa. It's what she did to me, but somehow, I'm still around. Sometimes I wish I weren't." _Except when you're here._

Good Hyne, he was certainly turning into a fucking pansy these days. Next thing they knew, he'd persuade Quistis back up onto the dock for a romantic waltz under the stars while he hummed the song they'd danced to at Selphie's party what seemed a century ago now.

He'd rather cut off his own balls and wear them as a necklace.

Quistis silently treaded water, never quite acknowledging him but never looking away either; he could sense her eyes boring into him, even with his closed.

"You know, I thought about you every fucking day. That's how damn annoying you are; you're like a fucking tumor or something."

"Thank you. How flattering to be compared to a cancerous growth."

Seifer finally opened his eyes, glaring at her. "You see what I mean? Always flapping your yap; you did that all the time when we were kids. "'Seifer, help me make a skirt for Dolly. Seifer, don't eat Zell's cookie! Seifer, carry my books home.'"

Quistis felt the beginning of a smile teasing her mouth by the end of his tirade despite his mocking tone. "'Seifer, don't put Zell's head in the toilet."

"Come here." he demanded.

The smile fell from her lips, dangling there for a moment, clinging like a persistent shadow before sloughing off into the water. Quistis' heart began a thundering drumbeat inside her chest, booming in time to the rhythmic stomp of a parade. She felt time falter to a halt, tripping over itself, then trying to get up and failing. 

"Come here."

Finally she did, moving hesitantly, stroking her arms through the water with such difficulty she wondered if they'd somehow rusted and locked in place, like the frozen pistons of a long unused machine. Her swim toward him lasted forever, even though he seemed close enough to touch if only her arms were just a little longer.

Quistis hit a pocket of colder water and suppressed a shiver, little talons of ice hooking in her spine and dragging their way up the column of her backbone.

She hovered awkwardly in front of Seifer, feeling self-conscious, wondering what on earth she was supposed to say to a dead man, one she'd pined over for more than a month, praying for a moment just like this one. How odd that once offered its deepest desires, the human mind suddenly ceased to function correctly.

He set his fingertips lightly under her chin, and she stared wide-eyed up at him, uncertain what to expect.

When it finally came, Quistis nearly forgot how to swim out of pure shock.

Seifer cupped her face in his hands and pressed his cold salty mouth to her own; it was the kind of kiss she never would have expected from him, unbelievably tentative and almost chaste. A testing the waters type of kiss, one that fired shockwaves through her nervous system, like a steel rod whiplashed by the forked devastation of a lightning strike.

Her eyes fluttered instinctively shut, and that same lightning bloomed behind her lids, a white-blue symphony of color and sensation that only she could see.

The hand that gently cradled her jaw was the same one she'd seen bounce lifelessly atop a field painted brilliantly in the strokes of his fleeing blood; the breath that fanned in spiraling waves across her face was the same breath that lay trapped in his stagnant chest while he died under the cheerful peach of an early morning sun.

It was these arms Quistis had wanted encircling her when Squall embraced her, these arms that now struck her as fantasy limbs spun from the whimsical threads of her mind, more delicate than glass or the sweetest of dreams.

They were the princess of the childhood fairytale, who vanished at midnight.

She pulled away, clenched her hands against his bare shoulders, and buried her face against his chest.

His touch was a simple beauty, because it meant he was _here_, alive, and yet she couldn't quite believe the power of it. A soldier must always follow the logical, and never the wishful.

And there was nothing logical about floating in an ocean strung with the magical illumination of the stars above, floating like graceful diamonds on the black silk of the water, or the walkway-lining lights of an elegant party. There was nothing logical about the hammering of her pulse, because it had not done that in a while now; in the time since his death, it seemed to Quistis that her heart had merely sat inside her chest, a child sentenced to the corner of the room who quietly contemplates their fate. It had not been an active part of her life, sluggish and just responsive enough to keep her alive.

He'd held it in the emerald gaze that had closed permanently on that blood-saturated meadow, like a firefly snagged helplessly inside a lamp, and she'd never even known it.

She felt warm in his arms, even as the liquid that drained off her body onto him condensed in cold beads on his limbs, collecting in the fine hairs there.

And fuck him, but he never wanted this to end. If he never did anything again but float in a starry ocean with his old instructor circled in the iron of his embrace, Seifer could live with that. If he let go, if he peeled his arms from this--would everything just vanish, dissipate into the smoky ruin of his future, taking her with it in a vaporous explosion of horribly misplaced dream and reality?

He craned his neck to stare down at the top of her head.

Was this how Squall felt when he rested his chin on the smooth dark head of Rinoa Heartilly? Was he always so nauseated by the same fusion of joy and terror that coagulated in the pit of Seifer's stomach?

She was reality in his arms--most of him knew that, even if a small part of him couldn't quite believe it. And reality, like dream, dispersed just as easily as mist. After all, didn't he of all people know just how fraile life really was? How fine an edge it balanced on, teetering just on the precipice of the nothingness that would eventually consume everyone?

Happiness tore at him, and he blocked frantically, like a fighter nearing the ends of his reserve. Bliss, like reality and dream, was so easily splintered by the cruel fist of fate.

He didn't know if he could survive a shattering like that again.

Seifer gazed for a long moment onto the damp brown of her hair--golden wheat transformed to a deeper shade by a rainstorm.

Then he let go, because it hurt even more to hold on.

* * *

"Arriving at Balamb Station in ten minutes."

It was a cheerfully automated voice that awoke Quistis, and she pulled her cheek from where it lay creased against the glass of her window, blinking the cobwebs of slumber from her eyes.

Beyond translucent glass, its surface casting a half-formed almost-Quistis back at her blurry gaze, she watched shadowed jade whirl past, nighttime forestland reminding her of his eyes hooded by the spidery fine curve of his lashes.

She remembered cold, and the contradicting burn of his arms, warming her flesh right down to the bone.

But his touch rang of shadow memories now, like dreams she'd had before, so realistic they might have been real, but weren't quite.

She scrubbed a hand across her forehead.

She had been less than useless during her trip to FH; the monster had never been seen again, at least not by her, and not only had she lost Save the Queen, but rather than her thoughts of Seifer lessening slightly with the change in scenery, they'd only grown stronger, until she was practically hallucinating.

Quistis tucked her hands beneath her thighs and shut her eyes, feeling sick.

_Seifer is _not _coming back. He's dead, and you need to accept that, not make up stories about swimming in the ocean with him. You are an utter mess, Quistis Trepe. _

In one of the train's cargo holds, a figure shifted away from the crate his spine pressed uncomfortably against, cursing as the locomotive's swaying motion jabbed a corner of splintered wood deeper into his back.


	15. Chapter 14

**A/N: I very rarely do dedications, but I decided to dedicate this chapter to Ms. Starlight, who is by far my most loyal reviewer. Just know that I really enjoy your input, which is always thoughtful, intelligent, and very much appreciated. And to everyone else who has ever reviewed, thank you for your encouragement; I love coming home to find a new review, so if you're reading this, please drop me a line and let me know what you think, whether good or bad! **

**Chapter Fourteen**

Classroom C45

Balamb Garden

The smile he hid behind his hand reeked of the old Seifer, a brash and cocky thing that spread sensuous lips beneath the layer of his new facial hair.

He smiled, because she looked just as scholarly as ever seated behind her desk, a new pair of glasses settled precisely in place of the old, capturing the lights of her own personal sanctuary and changing the blue eyes behind those perfectly arranged spectacles into twin pools of liquid sapphire.

And because she had no idea he was sitting four rows away from her at the back of her classroom, hunched behind his computer looking hard at work on the assignment she'd passed around at the beginning of the hour while he really watched her.

He'd taken care to avoid her scrutiny, though she'd seemed oddly subdued to him when he shuffled in behind a wall of students and skulked his way toward the back. The lack of any lecture resonated strangely in him; Hyne, she'd given fucking billions of them when he'd been a student, it seemed, and now she only spoke a few terse words and dropped a pile of paperwork onto a desk near the front to be dispersed evenly throughout the room.

_Maybe she listened to what I said about her lectures being boring._

Nah. That would mean Trepe actually had to place stock in something he'd said. She was the bookworm, not him. If she were to take anyone's intellectual advice, it certainly shouldn't be his.

Seifer examined the familiar room through the film of his new contact lenses, thinking how long it had been since his last foray into this place.

Forever. An eternity had passed since he'd last ducked through that doorframe, since he'd last watched the room's flourescent illumination coil in content slumber on top of her shining head.

The room hadn't changed. He didn't know whether to draw strength from this one constant in his life, or to sneer at its predictability.

The room had not changed, but Quistis had.

Not radically; not enough for the casual observer to even notice, Seifer doubted.

It was a new slant to her eyes, a new melancholy in the pretty gaze that granted the fine-boned face a maturity beyond anything he'd ever seen before. The last traces of childhood had inexorably vanished from Quistis' youthful features, peeled aside and discarded to reveal a woman of serene beauty.

Seifer hated that she could evoke these feelings in him; looking at her stole his breath, fear a living, thrashing beast in the pit of his stomach that scraped its claws down his spine. He couldn't touch her, because he was too afraid of losing her, but he couldn't let her go either, because he was even more afraid of not having her.

It was why he'd followed her onto the train back to Balamb, why he'd grudgingly accepted Squall and Headmaster Cid's plot to enroll him in disguise as a new student.

So he could start fresh, Cid claimed.

Well, fuck that. Seifer Almasy hadn't wanted this second chance; Squall had given it to him without permission, and he'd damn well intended to live it out in peace, and certainly not in the presence of Garden or Quistis Trepe.

Funny how the mouth that nibbled idly on the end of a pencil and the eyes that squinted down on her computer monitor had smashed all his plans to shit. It was a beautiful mouth and pair of eyes that captivated him, but he'd slept with enough gorgeous women to no longer be entranced by assets like that.

It was the woman behind those eyes that entranced him. It was the fire that scorched through the ice that enthralled him; it was the haunting childishness that eclipsed those mature features when she slept, wrapping him in protectiveness like a too-hot blanket.

It was recognizing the same emotion he glimpsed in Squall's eyes whenever he looked at Rinoa, burning now in Seifer's chest when she smiled, when the warmth of her fingers lay cradled in his own.

It was Seifer trying to fight his way up through the quicksand of his own emotions, and failing miserably.

Quistis frowned at something she read; he watched the wrinkle of her frustration crawl through the smooth brow, and, smiling again, decided to worsen it.

**Keeling3809: Hi, Instructor.**

_Hyne. Another Trepie? _She suspected so, and apparently so did her stomach, judging from the way it was attempting to slither up into her throat. Her own personal fan club seemed to be particularly bold lately, a tidal wave change from the usual hang-back-and-giggle-helplessly every time she passed one of her worshipers in the halls. What was wrong with that, for Hyne's sake? She could deal with distant adoration; this in-your-face adulation she was not so sure about, however. She'd never had to deal with it before, and she did not find it a helpful balm to the slow disintegration of her mind.

Quistis sighed and replied anyway.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Yes? Can I help you?**

She really did need to change that ridiculous screen name of Zell's. She kept forgetting to do so, and she doubted it aided her Trepie resistance any.

**Keeling3809: Hi, I'm a new student here. I'm sorry to bother you, but everything's kind of confusing right now. I was in your class yesterday during third period, and I'm having some trouble figuring out the homework you gave us. **

Quistis smiled. _This _she could handle. And the young man--or woman, she wasn't really sure, as she didn't recognize the name--seemed polite enough.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Go ahead. What was your question? **

**Keeling3809: What are you wearing?**

Polite. Or…not. _Dammit._

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Is there something I can genuinely help you with? If not, you need to log off now or I'll have your computer privileges revoked. **

**Keeling3809: Oooh, Instructor, you make me all hot when you talk like that.**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I'm tracking your IP address, cadet. Misuse of your computer privileges is punishable by up to a week of suspension, which will make it a little hard to go about doing that homework I gave you.**

**Keeling3809: Guess I'll be looking everything up by hand in the library, huh? **

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Yes, you will. Hopefully this will teach you that Garden's property is not to be used in tasteless jokes.**

Seifer waited, sitting back in his chair and folding his arms, the smirk coiling like a hibernating animal beneath the prickle of his beard, waiting for her reaction to fully bloom into self-satisfaction.

He saw her frown again as recognition widened the eyes, the single crinkle through her brow cracking into a million fault lines through the skin, anger furrowing pale flesh.

It was her teacher look, the one he realized with a deep and resonating pang that he'd actually missed a little. It was one he'd witnessed fastened on him countless times, one that pinned him again as the gaze darted up to find the culprit.

He waved, and his smile was pure charming Seifer now, even if the hair and eyes were not his, and the trademark scar had been mastefully plastered over by a layer of synthetic skin.

All the color drained from Quistis' face. She looked horrified.

It was his turn to frown now. _Well, that's flattering. _

Sure, he preferred his old look more too, but he didn't look _that _heinous, did he? Quistis looked like she wanted to vomit up every meal she'd eaten over the past three days. That was enough to damage a man's ego; one look at your face and the girl you were courting--ok, 'courting' was kind of a fancy term; actually he'd rather just forget her existence--suddenly appeared ready to dash for the nearest bathroom.

Zell probably would have given him a more welcoming reception.

**Keeling3809: What the hell's wrong with your face?**

Quistis gulped deep breaths of air, burying her fear of insanity beneath a layer of false assuredness. She was calm, logical Quistis Trepe, dammit, and calm, logical Quistis Trepe did not imagine dead men waving at her from the back of her classroom.

She sneaked another glance, and found him still there, indicating her computer with an impatient nod of his head.

He was almost-Seifer again, the man wearing a stranger's face but still possessing a few subtle nuances of the ex-knight that only she probably picked up on.

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: This is unacceptable. I have a job as an instructor to maintain; I will not allow myself to give in to these hallucinations. **

Now almost-Seifer looked bewildered, and the expressions on his face were so realistic she almost allowed herself to believe that it was a living, breathing human being facing her with a confused line drawn across his otherwise smooth brow, and not some image conjured from the depths of her lonely mind.

_No. Do not allow yourself to hope. That's a trap._

**Keeling3809: What the hell? Trepe, it's me, you idiot. You tried to rearrange my face in FH, remember? You didn't imagine that--'cause it fucking hurt. **

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: PTSD can form some convincing realities that in the end aren't really reality at all; I've read up fairly extensively on this topic, so I understand what's happening.**

**Keeling3809: Uh huh, that's great. Hey, you know what would be really great? If you could make some fucking sense. Why the hell do you think you're making me up? You don't remember Fishermen's Horizon? **

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I remember the images my mind made up there, yes. **

**Keeling3809: So let me get this straight, Trepe; you think I'm fake?**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: Essentially, yes. **

**Keeling3809: 'Essentially' my ass, dammit. I'm not fake!!**

**SexyBlondeWaiting4U: I won't fall into that trap again. Seifer is dead, and I've accepted that.**

_Fuck. _

He glared at her from his computer terminal, hoping she could feel every jabbing little spear of malice that knifed from the blue-green of his new eyes. It was his best glower he used on her now, as though a furrowed brow and the fever-bright malevolence of a stranger's gaze might convince Quistis of her foolishness.

She thought him a hallucination, a figment of her imagination. So he had to prove to her that other people could see him too.

Seifer drummed his fingers on top of his desk, thinking. Simply blurting out something random into the room's studious quiet would do the job; with everyone craning their necks curiously in his direction, Quistis couldn't deny his existence anymore.

Unless she'd convinced herself she was imagining this whole fucking room, too.

He scowled again, something vague percolating at the back of his mind.

Hammered by the sudden lightning strike of inspiration, Seifer minimized his instant messenger window and clicked on-line, navigating to a popular Quistis devotee site that he'd visited numerous times as a student when he wanted a good laugh. Obviously crafted by Trepies, it was such an over-the-top dedication to her that he knew one look at it would have painted a sunset hue of humiliation across those pastel cheeks.

He was going to take it a step further.

His idea lifted those familiar lips beneath their foreign hair and skin in another Seifer smile, one that set Quistis' heart to fluttering like an injured bird, careening wildly out of control into a crash landing of water and foam in the middle of an ocean. It was _his _smile, dammit, and it seemed so real to her that she could caress it with her fingertips, or her lips, the same way she had kissed a phantom in the swirling blue-black waters of FH.

Seifer scanned the page, a matte black background lavished with millions of tiny hearts and bearing several pictures of Quistis in various stages of repose; Quistis with her head thrown back in laughter, Quistis wearing a dark emerald cocktail dress at yet another of Selphie's parties, Quistis smiling gently off into the distance, eyes sparkling like a million sapphires, Quistis changing out of her shirt, breasts spilling beautifully over the top of her black bra. He wondered who'd sneaked that photo and silently commended them. He'd already seen what lay beneath that thin sheath of material of course, but the bra added a wonderful layer of mysteriousness that turned picturing what lay beneath into an interesting game.

_And…this is what I need. _He clicked on a link marked 'poetry,' smirking savagely again.

"Quistis!" he called out, clamboring up onto his chair and looking earnestly toward her, his changed voice making it easier to to keep the contemptuous sneer out of his voice, though just barely. The thought that any man--and he used that term lightly--could think up this kind of shit, let alone actually put it out there for the world to see, made him nauseated.

He felt even more sick uttering it out loud, but even worse than his urge to throw up was her embarrassment, and that kept him going.

"Quistis!" he yelled, and students everywhere around him begin to stir, some looking annoyed, others just relieved for this interruption in their schoolwork. "The fire of my love for you burns like a thousand stars!"

She half-rose from her seat, the expected blush already creeping its way into high cheekbones, a brush of the same fire he crooned about that burned in her eyes as well. It was a murderous glare she skewered him with, and Seifer felt triumph's hot blaze inside him, because with the anger came acknowledgement as well.

"You are my destiny, Quistis Trepe! Our love will ignite the stars that can't beam as brilliantly as my feelings for you; for you I would fight ten thousands sorceresses! I will be the Knight that slays your dragons, the hero that kisses away each teardrop of misery, because anything that hurts you hurts me ten million times worse; together we are an ocean of emotion, a tide of unstoppable power-" He broke off, trying to look emotional while he buried laughter deep inside him.

"Please take your seat, Cadet…" she ground out between clenched teeth, at a loss for a name.

"Keeling." Seifer supplied her, smiling with beautiful innocence under his beard.

Quistis' anger punctured the ice floe of misery trapped under the cage of her ribs, and breathed life into the animated corpse of her body.

That man was pure Seifer, even if only she could see it, and she was going to kill him.

She wondered, idly, how many times before she'd decided that she was going to kill him. He tried her patience even at the best of times, but now, with this very public, very humiliating declaration of false love, she knew without a single modicum of doubt that what Balamb's firing squads had not accomplished, she would.

"_Sit down_." Quistis hissed, ignoring the startled looks from several of her students, who were by now used to unenthusiastic silence from her. "You are being disruptive. Please sit down and finish your assignment, and let your classmates get back to their own work."

He climbed down from his chair immediately, and she breathed a silent sigh of relief, even as she should have been suspicious that he'd obeyed so quickly. A brilliant fighter, Seifer had never been the perfect soldier, for the simple reason that he could never just shut up and take orders. Ever.

So the core of ice that drilled into the base of her spine should have melted in anticipation's searing fire, mortification dissolving into resignation when he landed lightly on both feet, the soles of his boots reflected back at him by the room's shiny floor, and began to make his way decisively toward her. Unfortunately, it didn't, and so Quistis waited for him, dread freezing a thick column of frost through the center of her backbone and into her stomach, casting its wintry fingers up through her insides in broad paintbrush strokes of trepidation.

The dismissal bell buzzed distantly; it slid through Quistis' ears like a single power line, humming with sparking electrons. She felt it vibrate through her teeth as students slowly stood up and began collecting books and pencils, reluctant to leave but instilled with the kind of military obedience that forced them to. Still, several lingered far longer than they normally would have as he leaned an elbow casually on her desk, and familiarly, arrogantly winked at her.

She peeled her gaze away and threw it into a far corner of the classroom, hunching her shoulders defensively.

"So." he began casually, purposefully invading her personal space, leaning across her desk until she had to ease slightly away, lest the slightest twitch of her head bring their lips into accidental contact. "That was the worse piece of shit ever written. Your fan club is really pretty unimaginative. I do have to give them credit for getting a picture of you half-naked, though."

"What are you doing here?" she hissed, eyes narrowing into angry pinpoints behind the reflective glass of her eyewear, blue lasers that Seifer thought she probably very much wished possessed the power to kill.

"Trying to look down the shirt of that girl in row 3." he answered helpfully.

"Se-" She bit down on his name before it could tumble free, clenching both hands into fists on top of her desk. "What am I supposed to call you?"

"God works for me."

Seifer laughed in her face while those glittering jewel-toned eyes squinched even further shut, as though by slitting them until she could no longer see, Quistis could simply sieve him from her thoughts the same way she sifted his image between her lashes.

He straightened, gaze burning into hers. "See you tonight." The broad shoulders hitched beneath the crisp new leather of his dark jacket, Seifer's farewell rolling around his tongue like some foreign dish to be savored before devouring it. "_Instructor_."

* * *

Midnight found Quistis attempting to read a book, and attempting even harder not to think about him.

He wore two faces now, like opposite sides of the same coin, but to Quistis his hair always shone liquid gold beneath the tawny illumination of Balamb's first light, the murky turquoise of alien eyes registering only as wicked emerald. Even with the stranger's features covering his own, his presence announced 'Seifer' to her as plain and simple as though he wore the traitor's name around his neck, an I.D. badge he could never quite get rid of.

She stared down onto words that crawled their way off the page to drop into oblivion before her blurring eyes, and wondered what he was doing here. He'd had a job in FH; he'd been established there, to some degree at least. He hadn't…he hadn't come back for _her_, had he?

Quistis tried to laugh at that possibility, and choked on it instead. She couldn't quite appreciate the humor in such a ridiculous thought, because a part of her, the desolate lonely part that she locked tight in a secret part of her mind, wanted it to be true.

Wanting was not an Accepted Quistis Trepe Emotion. Wanting was an awful lot like hope, and too much hope, when applied in the wrong direction, killed the soul.

And Seifer Almasy was most certainly the wrong direction.

Frustrated, Quistis tossed her book down and picked up the mug of tea resting on the nightstand beside her bed, taking a tentative sip, then grimacing when she discovered that her distracted musing had prompted her to neglect her beverage until it grew stone-cold.

Not unlike the weight that settled in the pit of her stomach, resting against the coil of her intestines like a strand of winter's coldest snowflakes, strung together in an icy chain through the core of her being.

An insistent tapping scratched at her window, and Quistis felt her heart take flight into her throat.

_"See you tonight. _Instructor_." _

Dear Hyne, he'd been serious, and suddenly she could feel panic eating through that chain of snowflakes, dissolving it into a liquid fire that chewed up the length of each vein. What did he think he was doing, coming to her dorm room at this time of night, especially when she still harbored a faint throbbing malice that might very well flourish in his presence and end in spilled blood?

She scrambled off her bed, trying to calm her pulse.

The tapping repeated, a staccato drumbeat that matched the frantic thundering of the heartbeat jumping spastically in the side of her neck.

"Psst! Quisty! Quis! Open up, hurry!"

The panic tunneling through her had clearly crossed several wires in Quistis' brain over one another, because that almost sounded like Zell and not the deep timbre of Seifer's real voice nor the more sluggish drawl of his fake one.

"Quisty!"

It _was _Zell.

Heart still pounding, she yanked on the cord to draw up her blinds, and recoiled back as she squinted out the window into the crawling shadows of nighttime and abruptly found herself confronted with her friend's face, smashed into an unflattering pig's snout up against the pane of glass.

She unlatched the window and slid it aside, frowning. "Zell, what are you doing?"

He started to haul himself up inside, and she stood back to give him room, crossing both arms protectively over her chest as a cool breeze fluttered in through the open window. "Can I come in?"

"Please. Make yourself at home." she replied dryly.

He landed in a clumsy heap on her carpet, and she helped him to his feet, shutting the window behind him. "You could have simply knocked on my door, you know. There isn't really any need for such a clandestine entrance."

Zell ignored her and sprinted over to her closet, falling with a loud thump against the door and cursing, fumbling at it for a moment before finally yanking it open.

Quistis watched him in confusion while he stuck his head inside and jerked it frantically back and forth, jabbing his suspicious gaze into every corner, until, finally satisfied, he closed it again. Then he ran to her bathroom, opened that door as well, and repeated the same procedure, noisily throwing aside the shower curtain and banging open cupboard doors.

He was red-faced and slightly wild-eyed by the time he at last faced her, grim satisfaction sketched between his eyebrows.

"What's going on?" Quistis repeated calmly, bracing herself for some babbling tale of a hot dog abduction, or perhaps some dramatic recounting of a wild escape from one of the lunch ladies.

"You have to hide me!" he hissed, lurching toward her and grabbing a started Quistis by both arms, jarring her between his hands until her teeth rattled. "Quisty--you're my last hope!"

"What. Is. Going. On?" Each word rattled out abruptly, rough like a stream of fire from a machine gun cut off mid-burst.

"Sorry." He stopped shaking her and whirled, then, with a tense of his muscular legs, leapt straight toward her bed, burrowing into it like a soldier under fire seeking cover in a foxhole. He tunneled beneath her blankets, just a corner of one foot peeking out, until he rolled that too securely up inside her covers. "I need to hide here for a while, ok?" he whispered, the words muffled by layers of bedspread. "Selphie's crazy! She's looking for me! I just barely escaped, Quis! It was horrible!"

Used to Zell's flair for drama, Quistis simply smiled. "And why, may I ask, are you hiding from Selphie?"

"I have a date tomorrow."

"Ah." She didn't need any further explanation. It was one of the reasons she herself rarely dated, or so she liked to tell herself. If Quistis were completely truthful with herself, she could admit that she thought most men would probably find her boring once they channeled under the subtle mysteriousness she radiated. There was nothing about her to hold their interest, no dazzling smile of gentle, spunky beauty like Rinoa's, no crazy enthusiasm like the type that bubbled in Selphie. Just a quiet young woman who lived simply, with a never quenched thirst for knowledge and an innate curiosity and desire to fix the broken.

Seifer was broken. But he didn't need her to fix him, because he didn't need anyone, and her life could flow that much more easily if she could only stop thinking of him.

She tried to do just that, walking over to the sink of her tiny little kitchen and pouring her tea down the drain. "Was there a curling iron involved?" she asked, a tinge of sympathy curling its way through the question.

"Yeah! It was horrible, Quistis!"

Selphie had a certain…obsession--an unhealthy one, if you asked Quistis--with romance, and at some point during her life, the certainty that towering corkscrews of hair somehow equated itself with lasting love had skulked its way into her brain, and stayed there. She'd once seen Squall with half his hair crimped before he'd managed to escape, locking himself inside his office while Selphie pried beneath the door with determined fingers, brandishing her curling iron like a weapon every so often as Irvine tried to talk her into dinner at her favorite resaturant so Squall could slip free for a much-needed bathroom break. The woman was like a hurricane once set into motion--a devastating natural disaster that one could only hope to survive by avoidance.

She felt tempted to ask him who he had a date with, since Zell had even less experience with romance than she did, but since--for once--he didn't seem to be in a particularly chatty mood, she decided to leave him alone. This room, with its faint echoes of Seifer somehow trapped in everything she owned, probably from his brief stay with her a couple of months ago, closed in around Quistis with the finality of a hangman's noose, and she felt the sudden need to escape herself.

Sanity was such a fragile, feeble thing; she couldn't risk hers any more than she already had.

"You're welcome to stay as long as you need. I'm going to take a walk; I need some fresh air."

His head jerked back into view, eyes wide. "Don't--"

"No one but me will know you're here, I promise. Even if Selphie comes after me with her curling iron."

"Thanks, Quis. I owe you one for this."

She smiled and inclined her head gracefully in acknowledgement, grabbing the jacket draped over the back of the chair sitting before her computer desk. The rustle of his restless thrashing ribboned through her brain, a whisper that coiled around her mind and snugged tight.

She emerged into the deathly stillness of Garden's halls, her door clicking quietly shut behind her, and crept furtively toward the gaping maw of night.

It was a barren isolation that permeated the winding corridors, and the hollow echo of her boots on gleaming tile reminded Quistis of the stale ticking of her heart, pumping resolutely along over this past month and a half simply because it had nothing else to do. She marveled at the fact that it had been Seifer of all people who had instilled this kind of…insipidness in her, this numbness that tingled in the vacant cavity of her chest like needle pricks. Now that he was back, now that he was alive, could she allow herself to feel again, or was that simply too dangerous?

Seifer allowed himself to feel. Even after the horrors of Ultimicea, even after his ambitions crumbled around him like the sandcastles he'd demolished so long ago, he kept going, kept feeling when a lesser man might have shut down and stopped living altogether.

She saw that feeling in his eyes, no matter what color they were. They burned with a smoldering passion for something, whether it be him or life itself, but the spirit that even rigid military discipline had failed to bend still flickered in the faceted gems of those irises.

Evening snapped black jaws tightly around Quistis, filling her with a dense wind that played her hair like fingers strumming an instrument's strings. She felt her updo tear itself loose, and caught her hair clip before it could go sailing off into the bushes, pushing strands of blonde from her eyes as they attempted to blind her.

_Wonderful night for a walk. _she congratulated herself sarcastically.

At least the wind's crisp bite scoured unwanted thoughts from her head, giving her something else to focus on. She liked that, and walked straight into the teeth of night's mini-storm.

Somewhere far in the distance, thunder rumbled, and a raindrop splattered on the tip of her nose.

She didn't stray from Garden's grounds; instead, for reasons she didn't really know, Quistis found herself heading toward the courtyard where Selphie had thrown her last, disastrous celebration, where she had danced with Seifer under the stars that twinkled hesitantly above her now and found herself falling into an abyss she really didn't understand, even now. It had something to do with him, and the warmth of his body against hers, but beyond that Quistis found herself clueless.

She settled herself on the wall she'd hopped over to escape that celebration a lifetime ago, and sat looking up into the sky as storm clouds rolled in, spreading their cloaks of mottled purple over those bright stars.

"You picked a shitty night to take a walk."

Quistis supposed she should have been surprised to see him stride, sans disguise, from behind a nearby tree, but she felt only resignation as she looked down on his scarred forehead and the green eyes snapping bright flames of…something toward her. "What do you want? To get yourself killed?" _Again? _she added silently.

"Just wondering how you liked my poem." He grinned savagely.

"I had no idea there was such a sensitive, poetic soul lurking under the arrogance of my favorite student, just yearning to escape." Quistis told him, rolling her eyes. She pulled her coat more tightly around her, trying not to shiver.

"Tch. If I was that kid, I'd have shot myself in the kneecap, because that would hurt less than writing that piece of shit." He looked slightly wary now. "Still think you're imagining me?"

"Unfortunately, no."

The cocky glow returned to his gaze, and a small piece of Quistis was glad to see it, because it meant he really was here, standing below her with a sliver of moon drowning in the undulating ocean of his hair.

"Is that how you romance all of your women?"

"You'd be surprised how many pants a couple of cheesy lines can get you into."

"I'm sure." she said, tilting her nose up slightly, disapproval pinching her brow.

Sitting there with that superior look on her face, Quistis reminded him of their childhood; the look was one he'd seen often on her face as a child, usually present whenever she lectured him about something, which she'd done often. Those lectures had usually ended in her crying, or him getting punched, because he always interrupted her about halfway through to tell her with all the haughty arrogance of a child that she was boring.

"Where's Chicken Wuss? I saw him sneak into your room. You guys having an affair or something?"

"_Zell _simply needed a place to stay for a little while. And I believe peeping on women is actually considered a misdemeanor."

"So keep your blinds open while you're undressing and I won't have to sneak around."

Quistis impaled him with a glare. "What are you doing back here, Seifer?" she asked, making sure to keep her voice down.

He shrugged. "Cid and Squall decided to enroll me as a new student, since I can't exactly walk in wearing this face."

"I figured out that much. But why?" _And why my classroom? Like I don't have enough to deal with. _

"I hate fish. And FH fucking reeked of it."

"Yes; who would have thought a small town named Fishermen's Horizon, whose main source of income is its fishing, would smell of fish?"

Seifer crossed his arms and scowled at her. "Did anyone ever tell you that sarcasm is fucking annoying?"

"That's interesting, coming from _you_."

"It's only annoying when you do it."

"I see. And on you it's an endearing personality trait. You must attract women by the droves."

"I attracted _you_, didn't I?" he returned smugly.

Quistis blanched, startling so hard she nearly fell off the wall. He watched her steady herself with both hands, physically and mentally composing herself before answering. "Where would you get the idea that I'm attracted to you?"

"Aren't you?"

"I'm more likely to ride one of Garden's motorcycles naked through the middle of the cafeteria."

Seifer shrugged again. "I'd pay to see that. And any Trepie would sell themselves into slavery if that was what it took to afford to watch that." His eyes took on a contemplative glint. "You might be on to something, Trepe. I think you've found yourself a nice little source of extra income."

She thought longingly of kicking him in the head. "Is this why you followed me? So we could argue like two children fighting over the same toy?"

His face sobered, and, caressed by the thinnest strands of moonlight still visible through angry storm clouds, he was again the tragic hero standing with his hair blowing across eyes hard as jade, just the faintest core of softness in the stubborn gaze.

She wanted to think that softness was for her, but knew it wasn't.

"Let's leave." he said suddenly, stepping closer to her.

Quistis blinked, surprised. She hadn't expected that. His left hand touched her knee, and heat flared where his fingers rested, like a cinder from a fire sparking onto her pants to burn through the flimsy material. "Leave? And go where?"

"Don't you ever feel like getting away from this damn place once in a while?"

"This is my home." she responded simply. "And I've been away for a while now, if you remember."

"Come on, Trepe…Quistis. Let's take one of the cars from the garage. I'll drive."

"Yes, I can see the headlines now: Famous War Criminal Seifer Almasy Back From the Dead! Steals Expensive Vehicle With Partner-In-Crime Quistis Trepe, Former SeeD Instructor. High Speed Chase Through Deling City!"

He brushed his other hand across her opposite knee, and she tried to ignore how warm he felt. It was just the wind, persuading her with its keening wail that his fingers grazed ribbons of fire through her nerves when really she hardly even noticed his touch.

His face seemed uncomfortably close to hers; she'd forgotten how tall he was, how broad and physically imposing. He dwarfed her, like a parent walking sedately alongside their skipping child, the same way his hands made hers into miniature figurines of pale ceramic beside his own as they crept from her knees to white fingers.

She snatched her hands away, cheeks burning. "What do you think you're doing?"

Hyne. The woman's fingers were like fucking icicles. He picked them up again, ignoring her attempts to pull away, holding them between his palms, staring up at her through lowered lashes that dropped bars of darkness across bright green. He didn't know why--but fuck, who really could explain these types of feelings--but he was here for her. For Quistis, Seifer would sit through every one of those boring classes again, grinding his teeth as that primal part of him longed for action, because it put him that much closer to the young blonde instructor. Because it meant he could stop dreaming about her and actually touch her, even if every fleeting little graze of the fingers wasn't long enough.

She was turning him into a fucking sap.

He hated himself for these emotions, but he'd always been a man of action, and he hated storing them up beneath his ribcage, until they built into a tsunami of crushing force that would one day drown him with its blinding intensity. So while she stubbornly kept trying to extract her fingers from his, he just as stubbornly held on, trapping her in the emerald force field of that gaze until she had to look away.

"You need to go, Seifer." Quistis said softly after a while. "Someone might see you."

"Then come with me."

"No. I don't understand what it is exactly that you're trying to do, but it isn't…appropriate."

"That's because you're so fucking concerned with what's _appropriate _you can't see what's staring you in the damn face." he snarled, frustrated.

"And, what, Seifer, is staring me in the face?"

_Yes, Seifer. _A cold voice whispered at the back of his mind. _What exactly is it? Care to name it? _

The part of him that still remembered Ultimicea's voice coiled viciously, like a snapped spring whip lashing out of place. _You can't have her, because you kill everything that is good. There is no good in you, so what makes you think that you deserve someone like Quistis Trepe? You'll just destroy her. _

It was her poisonous voice that spoke to him now, and this time he did let go, because the voice was right, and Quistis, sitting there on the wall with the purple-black light painting her face in mauve patterns of illumination, looked just like an angel with her bright hair and face shining in contradiction to the roiling sky overhead. He had to wonder just what he'd been thinking, chasing after her like this when he was still a fucking failure of the worst kind.

She must have seen something in his face, because he felt her hand on his shoulder, gently supportive. He thought of throwing that hand back in her own face, but somehow he couldn't make himself do it, so instead he simply stood there, thinking how easily breakable those fingers seemed to him. "Seifer."

He looked away, the wind ruffling his hair, chasing it into the fingers that lifted to gently comb his bangs back from his scar.

Her cheek pressed against his forehead, soft like velvet.

He closed his eyes and breathed her scent, remembering waking up to the grainy scratch of sand beneath his cheek and ocean water stinging his ankles, that same scent hibernating in his nostrils. Involuntarily, his arms stretched up to circle her waist, pulling her down into his embrace, where she stiffened, but this time he banished Ultimicea's nagging presence, and simply held her against him until he felt her muscles blend more pliably against his.

Quistis felt…safe, cradled here like this against his chest. It was a foreign sensation, because she very rarely felt truly secure, even in her own skin. But somehow, huddling out of the wind's chill grasp with his face buried in her neck, she felt, with a curious kind of wonder, the hole that loneliness carved out of her chest slowly inflate, like a balloon pumped full of helium.

She turned her face away from his shoulder and watched the rain begin.

Esthar Sorceress Memorial

Esthar

Balamb's gentle rain transformed into a torrential downpour over Esthar, throwing up a veil of mist where it impacted against the pavement beneath his feet.

Squall realized he should have felt cold, should have felt…something, but there was simply nothingness, like the barren surface of some uninhabited planet.

Laguna's hand on his shoulder was a ghostly apparaition; there, but not quite, a weight he could acknowledge yet was numb to.

In a rare moment of son-to-father gratefulness, Squall wanted to thank Laguna for being there for him, but he discovered in trying to say so that his mouth no longer functioned correctly. He could see the thought clearly, could almost picture the words forming against his tongue, rolling across the pinched line of his lips and out into a hanging white cloud before them, and yet the mouth didn't so much as twitch. It was as though when they'd frozen Rinoa into that Memorial, they'd frozen him as well, captured him in a rigor mortis that held the same eerie finality as death.

He stared blankly into the perfectly-preserved stillness of her beauty.

_I didn't protect you the way I always promised to, did I?_

He felt like the hero of the story who has shown up one second too late to save his fairytale princess, arriving just in time to watch her fatal plunge from a tower top window, the beautiful head crowned with its halo of black hair splitting like a melon. Rivulets of phantom blood coiled around his boots, angry crimson like the fluid leaking across his left palm where his fingers dug into the flesh there.

Dear Hyne, he couldn't _stand _it.

The pain began to set in now, a flash bang of sensation inside his chest that reminded him of the serrated tear of Edea's icicle through his guts.

Squall grimaced, the skin around his scar bunching. He didn't like the way that pain began to eat away the numbness, chipping away gradual fragments of it like a determined sculptor. He wanted the numbness back, wanted that protective layer that he could wrap himself in like a scared child hiding beneath his blankets.

He stepped forward and lifted one hand to set it gently over her cheek, imagining he could feel its curve beneath his fingertips instead of the stabbing chill of her prison. The cold lanced through him, spearing each nerve as though it shattered into a thousand pieces and ripped open a million lacerations inside him.

"Squall, I'm…I'm sorry." Laguna said, fumbling for words behind him, clumsy as always.

That awkwardness had pissed Squall off for a long time, as though Laguna somehow failed as a father because of a little lack of finesse. The thought occurred to him now that at least he was here, standing right beside his son during one of the worst moments of his life, supporting him. A lot of people didn't have that; Seifer, with his matching scar and unfriendliness, didn't have that.

_Why am I thinking of him right now? _Squall thought hazily, trying to swallow around the knot in his throat and failing.

Maybe a part of him thought only Seifer could understand exactly how he felt right now. Unmoored, uncertain, and utterly, utterly alone, the same way the ex-knight must have been when Ultimicea at last loosened her claws and he had only the crumpled skeletons of his ambitions and the memory of her power in his veins to cling to.

"It's only for a little while, Squall." Laguna assured him quietly. "Just until we can figure out how to help her."

"No." Squall croaked, sounding hoarse and hopeless even to his own ears. He clenched his fingers around the cold fire that collected in their tips, Rinoa's prison burning under his skin long after he removed his hand. "No they won't. Everyone's too afraid of her to let her out again. But…thank you." Originally she'd been scheduled to ship to some military facility in Galbadia--until Laguna's timely intervention--where Squall would probably never be allowed even these unsatisfactory visits. At least here in Esthar under Laguna's watchful eye, Rinoa was as safe as she possibly could be.

Laguna re-settled his hand on Squall's shoulder, and gave him a reassuring squeeze.

Maybe the gradual chipping away of his control had finally fractured into a gaping fissure, or maybe it was that gentle pressure of his father's fingers, quietly supportive in their own inept, unsure way, but suddenly Squall felt as though he'd been clouted in the lungs by one solid hammer blow, a strike that forced every ounce of breath from him. He folded to his knees, gasping, and the gasps morphed with alarming swiftness into jagged sobs, the kind that seemed to tear his throat as they exited. Hunched in on himself, he wept brokenly, and it was the most heartbreaking sight Laguna had ever seen; such a proud young man whose most cherished personality trait was to never, ever lose his grip on the reins of his emotions-- no matter how desperately he wanted to--crying like a child into his gloved hands.

It was a moment that bypassed even his bumbling attempts at fatherhood, and he kneeled beside his weeping son, crushing him into an embrace that offered every wordless solace he held inside him. Squall returned the pressure of his arms fiercely, burying his face in the front of Laguna's shirt and sobbing garbled apologies, his entire body shaking with the force of his cries.

It's a parent's curse that they must feel everything that hurts their child a thousand times more acutely, and Laguna experienced this now, his heart crumpling under the weight of Squall's sorrow, agony arrowing down his throat and shredding everything it touched, until he half-expected to begin vomiting blood. He had never hurt so badly in his life, and the fact that it was his son's pain made it that much worse--even the loss of his wife, whose name he still couldn't utter without his throat clenching around the word, hadn't cut this deeply.

He had no words for this kind of suffering. Instead, he simply rocked Squall in his arms, like the little boy he'd never known, muttering wordless consolation to him while the rain continued to slash down around them like deadly knives.

Ultimicea watched Squall fall to his knees through Rinoa's eyes, the sneer of her contempt locked behind the frozen preservation of Rinoa's gently sad smile. How unbelievably precious that the dark-haired bitch had someone to grieve for her like that. How heartbreakingly sweet--the prince crying over his poor little princess, over the cruel shattering of their fairytale romance.

These idiots knew nothing of pain and suffering. They were like the puppets of some skilled puppeteer, led along by the strings of fate until the inevitable scissor snip that sheared apart the frail bindings of their lives.

She was the puppeteer, and she held their strings in her deft hands, even if they couldn't see her.

She could feel Rinoa at the back of her awareness, scratching away like a dog that wants out, trying to tunnel her way through into control once more, where Ultimicea had no intention of letting her. She needed all her concentration to break through the physical and magical restrictions of this place, and she couldn't do that with the pretty, useless little bitch distracting her, as she was prone to doing. So many thoughts crowded the brunette's mind--most of them centering on the young man kneeling before them both wailing out his misery in his father's arms--that the sorceress could barely hear herself think, let alone siphon her concentration into a single deadly point that would pierce the boundaries of this cold prison. She wanted so badly to snuff out the life of this young woman, to cradle the brilliance of that kind little soul between her hands and just squeeze, until it disappeared forever into the creases of her palms, but without a body she was far less powerful, and she doubted another one would be along anytime soon.

Especially not considering their current situation.

Rinoa flailed violently somewhere inside herself, fighting with every drop of willpower that her love for the man outside could conjure.

_Shut up! _Ultimicea snarled, and sharpened a thread of her malice to a deadly point, raking it along the girl's spirit like a razor blade, until finally the insistent echoes of Rinoa Heartilly faded away, and it was just the sorceress once more, looking bitterly out onto two dark, bowed heads while she weaved vague ideas into a coherent plot.

* * *

Shoreline of Balamb

Cliffs

"I can't see anything."

"That's because it's dark, Trepe--I thought you were supposed to be the smart one here."

"Very funny. Seifer, this is dangerous. Are you sure--"

A heavy sigh, seived between his clenched teeth. "Didn't I tell you to shut up? I can see just fine. I'm not going to let you fall over the side, if that's what you're worried about. Or push you. Although the second option is starting to look very tempting."

"You can see right now?" she demanded incredulously. "Are you part cat?"

"Are you part Chicken Wuss?" Seifer snapped. "'Cause you're annoying as fuck right now."

Quistis sealed her lips shut, thinking of how badly she could injure him right now--if only she could see him, and not simply a shapeless black blob in front of her that she figured must be Seifer. If not him, then who the hell was holding her hand?

She concentrated on the warmth of his palm around hers, and that eased her frustration a bit, those callused fingers wrapping hers with surprising gentleness, as though he imagined her to be a particularly fragile piece of glass that might plummet to the floor and smash into a million pieces at any moment. Part of her--the fiercely independent soldier that needed no one's assistance and viewed physical weakness akin to some great sin--hated the thought, and wanted to thump him in the back of the head for even making her consider it. But another part--the woman, the shy, modest teacher who flourished on her students' success--liked the security his hands lent her. When she wanted to crawl out of the skin that sometimes felt as though it belonged to a stranger, she could remember his fingers around hers, and remember that, for a while at least, Quistis had felt at home in her own body.

She supposed it wasn't so much a sense of security, but rather a fullness, an occupation of the hole that loneliness sometimes drilled into her. It was warmth, and contentment…and it was Seifer Almasy, of all people, who was giving her that sense of completion lately.

Ridiculous. Maybe she was far more insane than she'd originally thought.

"What are we doing?"

"Shh!"

Quistis rolled her eyes.

She sensed motion ahead of her, and suddenly his other hand enfolded her free one, doubling her heart rate until she was forced to take a steadying breath to control her pulse once more.

"Close your eyes."

"What's the point? I can't see anything anyway."

"Just do it. Hyne. Can't you do anything without arguing? I thought you were supposed to be good at taking orders. Isn't that what makes you Garden's little princess?"

"That's a funny reprimand, coming from you."

"Close your eyes."

"Tell me where we are, first."

Seifer leaned in, the glowing emeralds of his eyes close enough that she could see them now, his breath a soft whisper over her cheeks, the heat radiating from his body like a nuclear furnace to her chilled skin. He untangled one hand from hers, and lifting it, used the fingers to gently shut her eyelids.

"Seifer." Quistis scolded him. She tried to flutter her gaze open once again, but he kept his hand there, leading her forward with the other until she had no choice but to stumble uncertainly forward in the darkness. Adrenaline painted her lips now, a bitterly metallic cosmetic across the mouth. She tasted its pungent tang against her tongue, fear of the unknown joining it to form an acidic fusion in her mouth.

He led her up the slanted face of a boulder; she could feel its incline, and the evenness of stone beneath her feet. To her left, the crashing of ocean waves infiltrated the idyllic silence, and her lashes grazed his palm, straining to see. "Seifer-"

"Hang on." Quistis felt him take her by the shoulder and turn her, so that she stood facing the ocean's cold spray as it collided with the cliff face and lashed her with a few stinging droplets. "All right."

His hand lowered, and she opened her eyes--on a scene straight from some childhood fairytale.

Quistis Trepe was not a woman prone to aesthetic awe; mostly because there was nothing practical or necessary about oohing and aahing over something pretty, but even she felt the fingers of enchantment grip her as her eyes widened on a wonderland of lights strung in a single bobbing curtain beneath the sea's rolling surface. From this vantage point, she could see that the clouds coating the moon had parted a bit, letting through the distant twinkle of stars and creating an odd, beautiful symmetry between the sky and the ocean.

He stepped up beside her, hands in his pockets.

"What is it?" she asked, enthralled.

Seifer shrugged. "Jellyfish. Some kind of chemical they secrete makes them glow in the dark. For some reason a bunch of them like to gather here. I thought it looked kind of cool."

_I thought it looked kind of cool. _The statement was so casual, so utterly masculine in its indifference to splendor that Quistis felt herself smile. "It's beautiful." she corrected him matter-of-factly.

His eyes burned into the side of her skull. It was an intensity of focus that made her uncomfortable, but she knew that telling him so would only make him even more determined to invade her personal space, so instead she said nothing, simply enjoying the view and hugging her arms around herself to keep warm.

After a long time she felt him move closer, and his hand began a fumbling quest to find her own, clumsy in an un-Seifer-like way that had her startling slightly away from him. "What are you doing?"

He scowled. "Come on, Trepe; don't pretend you don't want me." He seized her hand finally without almost rough triumph, and held it tightly in his own, lowering the tangled union of their fingers between them. The breeze off the ocean whistled around the knot of flesh, trying to numb her fingers--but somehow it couldn't quite succeed, not with the flame that ignited beneath her skin burning so hotly.

"Excuse me?"

His profile gave away nothing; he was just Seifer, nothing more and nothing less, and at that moment he probably could have given Squall a run for his money in stoicism.

"Seifer." Nervous, she tried to pry him off her, but he wouldn't let go.

His heart was pounding like an out of control jackhammer, its thunder swelling in his ears until he could no longer even hear the din of colliding water far below them. He tasted bile--it sat on the taste buds smugly, adhering to his tongue like it planned to stay for a long time.

He hadn't really planned this--which was probably a good thing, or else he'd have never had the nerve to go through with it. It was a funny thing, really, that nerves came into play now for Seifer, for a man who gladly rushed headlong into battle feeling only the euphoric kick of adrenaline, and never the apprehension. How could he watch blood spray in artistic fans of red from a gaping throat and not even blink, not even imagine that in another moment that could be him kneeling there bubbling out his last breaths--but not tell some damn woman how he felt about her without feeling like he was about to piss himself?

"Do you know why I came back, Instructor?" He didn't know why he called her that now--maybe it eased the significance of what he was about to say; maybe it reminded him of the old Seifer that seemed a long ways away now, the Seifer that had nothing but contempt and a very small, very grudging amount of respect for her.

Maybe deep down he thought it would annoy her enough to miss what he was planning on saying next.

She flicked a glance at him out of the corner of one eye, looking not unlike an animal frozen in the middle of a road while headlights painted its quivering body in a spotlight of impending death. "You wanted another chance; you decided to take what Squall gave you and use it to your advantage, even if it wasn't what you originally wanted--"

"Bullshit." he snapped, anger threading its familiar line through his scar. "You know that's bullshit."

Quistis looked away, and he thought he saw her flush in the moonlight, a sunset hue that colored the pale marble of her cheeks.

"I came back for you."

"I thought you didn't like FH." she said carefully, still not looking at him.

He burned with fear and a million other emotions--it was ridiculous, but suddenly his entire life hinged on this one moment, and he was teetering on the cliff edge of this instant in time, terrified of the fall but even more terrified of what happened if he didn't plunge over the side. At least he knew what the fall felt like; this time it would probably leave him broken among the sharp rocks at its bottom, but at least that was familiar. Ultimicea had made sure of that.

This…this was completely foreign to him. The concept that a woman could destroy him with just a few simple words, or the cutting look of derision that Quistis fired at him now, had never occurred to Seifer.

His ribcage clenched around his heart; he felt his ribs poking holes into the failing walls that he'd built around it, and now he knew that this new fall would devastate him when nothing else had ever been able to.

"This is ridiculous. You can't play with people like this, Seifer. I'm not going to let you treat me like an object to be _toyed _with--"

"_Shut up_." he snarled, dropping her hand. "Knock it off, Trepe. Knock it the _fuck _off." He faced her with rage blazing from his eyes, his anger forming two points of emerald light that sharpened to daggers of fury. She edged backward a small step, suddenly afraid; this man was dangerous, and she was entirely alone with him, with only the ocean to hear her cries for help. He'd been a murderer, a traitor not long ago, and while she'd wanted to believe that had all been excised from him when Ultimicea lost her grip on the arrogant young man, perhaps shards of the sorceress still chased themselves around his soul, enough to turn on Quistis when she was at her most vulnerable.

"Seifer--" She knew better to reason with a man who understood only blood and violence, yet still a part of her attempted to.

He seized her face in both of his hands, cutting her off, and she realized then that this was not the same anger that had chewed away at his soul during the war--this was pure razor-edged frustration, serrated and cutting like the slivers of ice that suddenly stabbed her heart.

"This is about you being a fucking coward." he hissed in her face.

She kept her face framed in his palms, stunned into motionlessness. "What are you talking about?"

"I came back for you, dammit, and now you're trying to run away from me because you're scared someone's getting close to finding out that you're not always the Ice Queen."

At least, he damn well hoped that was what this was about--the alternative was that all her attentions toward him had been nothing more than pity, and if that were the case, than he might as well just throw himself off this fucking cliff right now. He didn't know if there were any sharp rocks waiting for him below, but the impact of his body on the water ought to do the trick well enough.

"Seifer--" He didn't understand what he was asking of her. He wanted her to stray from the practical, and delve into matters of the heart, and he was right--she was much too cowardly to step out of her comfort zone that way. She was pragmatic, he passionate, and he was expecting her to just make that transition as smoothly as the waves hammering their ceaseless beat against the rocks below. She couldn't do that, and she hated herself for it, because the angry look in his gaze was rapidly beginning to take on a frantic, desperate edge that she never would have imagined in his eyes.

"Why the hell did you beg Cid to save me if you don't really give a fuck about me in the end?"

Horrified at his assumption, she recoiled, trying not to focus on the pain clouding the slightly dilated irises; it hurt her like a spear to the throat, and she tried not to think about how he must be feeling.

_"Seifer had a younger brother. A few months before his mother brought him here, there was an accident. I don't know the exact details of it; she wouldn't tell me. But essentially the story was that his younger brother drowned, and they blamed Seifer for it. His father refused to have anything to do with him after that; in fact, Almasy is his mother's maiden name. And finally, his mother just decided she couldn't look at him the same anymore. I don't know what his home life was like before his brother's death, but he'd obviously been abused when Cid and I took him in. He had bruises…everywhere."_

_"Why the _fuck _did you do that? You don't want me." _

Matron's voice and then Seifer's slinked through Quistis' ears, the sweet wind chime timbre competing with harsh gravel. Looking at him now, and remembering all that she knew, both personally and what she had gathered and pieced together from other people, Quistis realized this was about more than Seifer being pissed because he wasn't getting his way--he was terrified of that unwanted feeling, of the knowledge that even his parents hadn't wanted him, so why should anyone else?

Maybe, Quistis thought, with the lightning strike of realization, that was why he had ultimately turned to the sorceress; more even than her aptitude for controlling minds, it had been the fact that she wanted _him_, Seifer; she wanted him, when no one else would take him.

She shut her eyes, and reached up to slid her hands over his own where they still lay over her cheekbones, clenched now in fists of helplessness, tense like a beaten dog that expects the hand lifted to pet it to fall in a harsh blow. She rose on tiptoes, and her lips touched his forehead, very lightly, a hesitant graze across the flesh.

The coiled springs of his muscles relaxed ever-so-slightly.

He closed his eyes now too, and she felt him shift into her, leaning down until their foreheads touched; with the ocean's soundtrack playing on an endless loop in the background, it made for a content moment, and when he grabbed one of her hands again, she didn't resist this time.

His mouth brushed hers. Once, twice, just for a second, and then it blended with her own, and that prolonged contact injected fire into her veins; she supposed she should be past it by now, but a small part of her still clung stubbornly to ignorance, trying to pretend that this meant nothing to her, that she didn't want to give the proverbial middle finger to Garden and her duties and the stress of Ultimicea's return and just stay here like this with him.

Seifer dropped his hands, and closed them around her waist. He pulled her against him, thinking distantly that he knew now why Squall always had that certain look in his eyes when he glanced at Rinoa, why men sometimes made such stupid, over-the-top gestures for women when they were afraid of losing them.

Fuck, he was scared. Liquid terror coalesced in his gut, burning the lining of his stomach. You couldn't have this, and not be scared; once, very briefly while under Ultimicea's control, Seifer had broken the mental straps she stretched tight over his mind, and looked directly into the swirling vortex of her madness.

That was nothing compared to this.

He crushed her against him, until there was no space left between their bodies, and he could feel every curve of hers pushing into him. The kiss turned fervent, as though if he pressed just a little bit harder, pushed just a little bit closer, he could keep her from vanishing between his hands like the mist that rose in lazy coils off the ocean's surface. His tongue traced her bottom lip; she parted her mouth a little cautiously, and he matched that caution, something he wouldn't have thought he could do; prudence was hardly Seifer Almasy's forte. But he sensed her inexperience, and knew that too much could scare her away, and he didn't want that. Most of the time he wasn't exactly sure what he wanted, but he knew that was one thing he couldn't live with.

Quistis tangled her hands in the hair at the nape of his neck. Her fingers brushed soothing strokes across the warm skin she found there, and his body shivered in response; she turned his knees to warm water, and he broke away before she could figure out just how much power she held over him in that moment.

He kissed the point of her chin, the side of her neck, then buried his face there and hugged her tightly against him. This curve was where her scent thrived most strongly, and he inhaled deeply, trying to memorize it.

"What do we do?" Quistis asked quietly after a moment, continuing to stroke the nape of his neck, and he had to smile, because she sounded just as practical as always.

"Well the next step involves a lot less clothing and the insertion of--"

She punched him in the right shoulder, staggering them both back a little. Seifer gripped her more tightly around the waist, staring down into her flushed face and trying not to smile again at how flustered she looked. "You're blushing, Instructor."

"I mean," she continued on in the same vein, ignoring him, "We can't…be like this. At Garden. You're Jace Keeling now, and you're my student again."

"Please." He snorted. "You think none of the other instructors have tapped a couple of student asses? I _know _that little brunette in B-13 was giving Raijin--"

"Seifer, these are my _colleagues _you're talking about!"

"'Colleagues.' Who the fuck talks like that? Sometimes you sound like you're forty."

She glared at him. "You're avoiding the subject."

"No; teasing you is just more interesting."

"I'm glad." she replied dryly. "Seifer--"

"We'll come here." he interrupted her. "I need someplace to go where I can be Seifer, and you're the only person who know besides Squall and Cid, and I really think Puberty Boy probably isn't foaming at the fucking mouth eager to take little romantic getaways with me." He looked down at her. "You want to go back now?"

"No," she said, surprising both of them. "Zell's probably snoring away in my bed right now, and…"

"And you'd rather be with me." Seifer filled in for her, smirking self-satisfactorily.

"No. But I'd rather not have to listen to him, either."

"And you'd rather be with me." he repeated matter-of-factly.

She pressed her face into his chest so she wouldn't have to look at him. _Yes. _Quistis admitted reluctantly to herself. She'd rather be standing in the teeth of a coldly harsh wind with him than snuggled under warm covers that somehow never managed to keep out the stagnant chill of loneliness by herself. She couldn't explain this--but for once she would hold off on explanations, on clarifications, on thinking; she could do that tomorrow, in the morning, when the gentle pulse of starlights beneath the ocean's waves didn't glitter so brilliantly, and his arms didn't feel quite so safe and warm around her body.


	16. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fifteen **

Caverns

Balamb

Flickering torchlight painted the orange-crimson of bloody highlights across her hair and cheekbones, scattering in a rainbow prism of gory color over her skin and sinking into the pools of her blue eyes. Their reflective depths captured the flames in twin spirals of sputtering burgundy, giving an eerie, hellish twist to the classic beauty of her features. It was an impressive figure she cut, standing before her students outlined in an aura of red that lent her the authority of some flaming god, the strands of her hair shining with the red-gold of superheated metal.

Seifer barely even noticed; he was too busy glaring at her.

His scowl of anger puckered the scar tissue beneath his false skin, pushing the knot of ruined flesh up against sweaty latex and making the damn thing itch even more. His temper teetered on a blade-thin see-saw, his tenuous control frothing and snapping like a mad dog just waiting to maul the first hand that stretches out to touch it.

She hadn't even looked at him all damn day. No, scratch that; she hadn't looked at him all damn week, ever since--coincidentally enough--his little confession on top of the cliffs when he'd laid everything out on the line for her. In class her gaze simply flickered past him, and though he'd visited what he secretly liked to think of as 'their' spot faithfully, she'd never shown, not once, and now, now--

It was like he didn't even exist. He was a black gravity well in the nothingness of space, sucking determinedly away at the blank vastness of his surroundings, without anything to ever show for it. He felt like the persistent fly buzzing in loops of frantic pleading around her head, begging with the vibrating chirp of its wings for just a single glance, the smallest acknowledgement of his existence. Worse than that--because even a fly would have garnered an annoyed flick of the hand--Seifer felt like the disease-ridden, microscopic fleck of shit speckling one of the fly's legs.

She'd made him promises--maybe not aloud, but the liquid churning of those flaming eyes had spoken pledges to him that he'd been stupid enough to believe. The tender graze of her fingers along his neck still burned against the hair there, phantom sensations that danced like the ghosts of alternate realities, parallel worlds where Seifer Almasy was still hated, still hunted, but at least Quistis Trepe loved him, even in the moments when he couldn't love himself.

His heart smoked in his chest.

Fury constructed a black cage around the pulsing hammerbeat of the organ, expanding like an over-inflated balloon inside his chest until Seifer thought it might explode in an arc of blood that splashed its searing strings all across her pretty little face. Would she fucking notice him _then_, with the burning rivers of his gore etching rivulets of acid across her cheekbones?

Her voice echoed deity-like in the hollow globe of the cavern they gathered inside. He couldn't pick out individual words--the roaring in his ears drowned the syllables of her lecture. It was probably a good thing, because one more sentence about the preliminary SeeD exams really might send him over the edge.

This was a practice run for those of her students who would be taking that exam in just a few short weeks, to let them know what to expect and prepare them for the trials ahead. Seifer had invited himself along even though he had no intention of trying for SeeD again--she wouldn't refuse, because that meant, Hyne forbid, she would actually have to _speak _to him. He'd figured that with only four of them here beside Quistis, this was as good a chance as any that he'd have to talk to her. He hadn't calculated that out quite right, apparently, because so far she'd proved particularly apt at completely dodging him. Well, she couldn't fucking well ignore him forever, and it was about damn well time to remind her of that.

Seifer pulled his sidearm--he hated regular firearms; they seemed so clumsy and inelegant in comparison to the deadly grace of his gun blade, but Hyperion was about as dead a giveaway as the scar Squall had marked him with so long ago. And so it awaited him in the lightless depths of his dorm room closet, tucked so craftily into shadows not a single mercury-shimmer of silver blade betrayed it even with the door wide open.

Aiming casually, he blasted a chunk from the cavern wall a few feet to her left.

The report rang on and on, chasing itself around the chamber in an endless sort of loop that reminded Seifer of the futility of a dog pursuing its own tail. Quistis jumped, the new whip which had replaced Save the Queen already half-uncoiled in her hand before she realized what had happened. It looked odd dangling between her fingers, like a best friend replaced with a stranger who poorly mimics every nuance of the old companion.

She shot him a look parked halfway between irritation and wary unease--like she wanted to ignore him but knew this was an act that couldn't be left untouched. "Is something wrong with your weapon, Cadet Keeling?"

"Yeah. I pulled the trigger and it went off. Was that supposed to happen?"

His classmates turned to gape him, disbelieving that he would have the audacity to make smart ass comments on a trip as important as this one.

"Yes. It is." Quistis commented through her teeth, trying not to give him the satisfation of sounding angry--an emotion which the mottled red of her face gave away, unless that was just the torchlight's burnished glow coalescing in livid splashes over her features. Vivid scarlet like the raw meat of a fresh wound, they pulsed angrily, and whether it was again some trick of the light or her own rage, Seifer couldn't be sure.

But he could imagine it as fury easily enough, and that was good enough for him.

His lips cracked in a feral wolf's grin. He sensed a couple of students edge away from him, but whether they were afraid of him or Quistis' impending punishment, he couldn't be sure.

"Cadets Davis and Rigley will comprise Squad A. Cadets Keller, Langlin and Bonday will form Squad B. You are to explore the caverns, defeating any monsters you encounter, and rendezvous back here at the entrance at 1400 hours. Dismissed."

Seifer noticed his name hadn't been included with the rest, and, clasping his hands behind his back, he adopted an innocent look for the eyes that skittered curiously his way.

Quistis waited for them to proceed deeper into the caverns before turning to face Seifer, lips tightly compressed. Her features formed a complex map of fracture lines, just faint traces of displeasure that he could barely see, like the outlines of the earth's tectonic plates on a map.

He suspected she was shaping up for at least a 7.5 on the richter scale, and smiled to himself. A little recognition at least, finally.

"What do you think you're doing?" Quistis demanded coldly. "You put my students at risk; one of them could have been caught by a richochet."

"They all looked ok to me."

"That's not the point--_Jace_. What you just did was dangerous and unprofessional. And inexperienced." _Which you are most definitely not. _she thought to herself.

He studied his nails, ignoring her reprimands. Heat built beneath her chest, a nuclear furnace that boiled like the lava rivers awaiting them deeper inside the cavern. She had a good guess as to what this was about--and the fact that he'd put her students in danger simply because he was sulking like the little kid whose mother isn't paying enough attention to them really pissed her off. If she could only wrap her whip around his throat, back him against a wall, and--but no. Quistis Trepe did not allow her emotions to take over like that, and though this was the only man alive who could push her so close to the edge of madness, she wouldn't let him win by losing her temper.

"Jace. Is there something you need to discuss with me?"

His eyes held a fire that had nothing to do with the flickering torchlight around them when he looked up at her. She blanched a little, taking an instinctive half-step back, and once again Quistis was reminded of just how dangerous this man was.

"Yeah. There is something I need to fucking discuss with you, _Instructor_." That emphasis on her title again, a seething insult wrapped in false respect. The word rankled like bitter acid inside her, and in that moment all the fight left the spring-tight coils of her muscles, and now all she saw standing before her was a young man who'd gone through a hell that still hadn't hurt as badly as the callous way she'd been treating him all week.

Quistis sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

"I'm tired of you ignoring me." he snarled, the vehemence of his anger trailing off a little toward the end of the sentence, strangled by the bitterness that clogged his throat. Sudden humiliation flashed across his face, like he'd just realized that she was smart enough to figure out that his rage was only a protective layer coating hurt feelings.

He sneered and half-turned away from her, crossing his arms over his chest.

She clasped her hands in front of her, because she didn't want to touch him--not right now, because if she did, the cold knot of emotional distance she'd carefully constructed in her gut might evaporate. "I understand I might have given you certain…impressions last week, and I'm sorry if I did. But right now, I think it's best if we simply--" She looked away from him, searching for the right word.

But in the end, there was nothing she could say that would soften this particular blow; she could see it in his face even as he tried to hide it, and sudden regret pulsed in her heart, hotter than magma.

What right did she have, to deny whatever they shared simply because she was afraid? Wasn't it time for Quistis to finally stop shunning intimacy, to just let go and take that plunge into the uncertain abyss that is the roller coaster of emotions between two people? Seifer had been damaged worse than any of them by the war, and yet here he stood, smeared with the blood of the illumination around them, staring at her like he couldn't see anything else.

Quistis recognized adoration and lust, but the burning in his eyes was different.

It reminded her of what she glimpsed in Squall's gaze whenever he looked at Rinoa, and that scared the hell out of her.

"I get it." Seifer said, his words quiet, but sharper than knives, ripping through her chest to flay the organs within. "You're a coward."

The words hurt, but she couldn't deny them. So she simply stood there, saying nothing, with her head bowed because she was such a damn coward she couldn't even face him right now.

"Quistis." Her name emerged roughly, as though gravel coated tongue and throat. "Look at me."

A hand closed like steel around one of her arms, mercilessly unrelenting. She pulled back instinctively, but he just held on, and it was like struggling against a boulder, pointless and stupid. Then his fingertips lightly caressed her chin, and they were so soft, so unlike the stern features and the harsh words, gentle like warm sunlight sprinkling over summer sand, that she had to tilt her head up just slightly.

The side of his head exploded in a plume of red just as her eyes met his, and a scream dragged its barbed hooks over her throat. Quistis stumbled back as he sagged forward onto her, and something punched her hard in the back, slamming them together into the icy nothingness of oblivion.

* * *

His head fucking hurt.

It was the first thing Seifer noticed when he pried his eyes open onto a scene of blurry ambiguity--he wasn't sure at all what he was looking at right now, because his mind kept blinking on and off, like a TV monitor on the fritz, consumed by static during the moments it didn't offer a fuzzy, barely-there picture of shitty quality.

When his aching brain at last began to piece together the jigsaw pieces of his surroundings, he found he had to shut his eyes against the solar glare of gold that stabbed through his lashes and skewered his eyes on spears of yellow light. It was a vicious assault on his senses, with his heart as the main victim when the lightning flash of recognition seared through his nerves, and he jerked his eyes open so hard he almost screamed.

Gummed shut with the crust of his unconciousness, and something else too--blood, he thought--they tore painfully, and he sat there blinking for several long moments before he could bring her into focus.

When her image finally coalesced from the hazy splinters of his distorted vision into a full picture, Seifer nearly screamed again. Bile tained his mouth, and he bit down hard on his tongue to keep from throwing up, something tearing open deep inside him.

Her beautiful hair hung limp and red over both shoulders, framing a face of bleeding lacerations, porcelain skin cracked by a thousand gaping rips that leaked rivers of blood down her chin. She was shackled and drooping limply from the wall across from him, chest rising and falling shallowly, and if Seifer Almasy had ever wanted to die, this moment was it.

He had never hurt so badly as he did looking at her now, with her clothes hanging in shreds from her beautiful body and her cheeks sporting the angry violet of large bruises. She looked like she just barely clung to life, and when he squinted a little harder, Seifer could make out the purple-red of finger-shaped contusions decorating her chest, just above her breasts.

He was a flaming torch of useless hatred.

Something moved at the corner of one eye; he shifted his head to follow the motion, predator-slow as he tracked this one prey he could see.

The man looked at him without concern while Seifer studied him. He wore the uniform of the Galbadian army, and a look of boredom that only threw oil on the fire of Seifer's rage.

"Hey, Dagan! The guy's awake!"

_Dagan. _The name resonated inside him, striking a gong inside Seifer's chest, the vibrations extending out through his arms into the very tips of his fingers. He closed his eyes for a second, steeling himself, and when he had gathered the courage to look once more, he saw a dark-haired man with the clenched lantern jaw and military buzz cut of a career soldier, the kind of man who knows nothing other than death and war.

His mind skittered off to study other things, like the glowing rock of the walls enclosing him--they were still inside the cavern, he deduced, though deeper-- and the bodies of Quistis' students scattered casually on the floor between them like unwanted refuse.

The man stepped over them like they were nothing, and came to stand in front of Seifer, crossing his arms over a well-built chest. His voice was dispassionate, not robotic, but without any hint of reget or recognition.

"I don't have any interest in you, Almasy."

_Shit. _So much for the world's impression that Seifer Almasy was dead.

"You're going to die. I'm not going to lie to you--but we need her," He indicated Quistis with a nod of his head, "and you can make this a lot easier on her if you cooperate. Because, unfortunately, I do need your help."

Seifer searched for his voice, seeking out the dark place where it quailed, coiled around itself like a terrified animal. "Did you do that to her?"

"I need you to steal Rinoa Heartilly from the Sorceress Memorial."

Seifer ignored the man's demand. "Did you do that to her?" he repeated, his tongue rasping like sandpaper against his throat. At the corner of his other eye, he noticed three other men gathering in a little knot, all dressed in the same uniform worn by the first man he'd spotted.

"Yes, and if you don't cooperate, I'll let them gang rape her. We just need her alive. Whether or not she's damaged a little doesn't matter."

Seifer lunged forward, but he was trapped in place just like Quistis, and the jingling soundtrack of his imprisonment drilled like razor wire through his ears. He would rip this man's throat out with his fucking teeth if he had to, and if any of them dared to even _try _and violate her in such a horrible way, he'd do the same to them.

Dagan didn't move.

Seifer lunged again. It was the futile attempt of a caged animal, but he kept it up anyway, a mindless barrage as blinding rage devoured common sense. His fingers formed the claws that would pluck this man's eyeballs from his skull, and distantly, he felt blood sliding down his wrists where the cuffs broke skin.

"Are you done?"

"Don't touch her." Seifer snarled. "Don't you _ever _fucking touch her, you piece of shit--she's so much better than you--you shouldn't even be allowed to fucking _look _at her--"

"Are you done?" the man asked again, his eyes drilling icy derision through Seifer's body. "Will you cooperate with us?"

Seifer spit, a perfect arc of saliva that caught him right in the eye.

Dagan wiped the glob from his face. "Rape her until she screams. Then keep going until he screams."

"Stay the fuck away from her! _You stay the fuck away from her_!"

Her blue eyes opened and merged with his own, and Seifer saw no fear in her face--it must have been there, had to have been, but she hid it well, and only sent him the faintest of smiles, accompanied by a shake of her head. _Don't. _He could almost hear her voice inside his head, and the fact that she was still so damn brave, so unshakeable, even at a moment like this, made him want to cry. He'd been wrong when he called her a coward--Quistis Trepe was the fucking bravest woman he'd ever met, and he loved her so much it fucking hurt.

He'd admitted it now, if only to himself--this was not some temporary infatuation, like he'd been struggling to convince himself. He loved this woman, and if he had to burn the entire world to keep her safe, he didn't fucking well care.

They approached in slow motion, a corpse-slow crawl of time, acid chewing through his veins while he hammered his wrists relentlessly against the steel framework of their prisons. "Get away from her! Get them the fuck away from her! I'll do it. I'll do whatever the hell you want me to!"

Her assailants paused, looking to their leader for direction.

Dagan shrugged. "Do it anyway." He flashed Seifer a cold, cold smirk, one the former knight felt like an icy scythe through his bowels. "I'm not sure he thinks we're serious."

Looking at Seifer right now broke her heart.

He was panicked, his mask peeled off to reveal his real face, the contortion of his features a kind of horror she'd never seen him wear before. His screams were almost bestial, shrill in a way that cut through her ears into the fog of her brain.

Whatever they did to her would hurt him ten times worse; she could tell that just by looking at him, and it destroyed her. Hadn't he endured enough already?

She couldn't speak quite yet; she tried to, but her tongue seemed to have glued itself to the roof of her mouth.

Instead, she sank back into herself, the world and his tortured face blurring out of focus, wrapping herself in the thick gauze of nothingness. The pressure of hands at the waistband of her pants was a distant sensation, one that didn't concern her as she probed the cottony darkness of her mind for the presence lurking somewhere inside there.

But she could still hear his screams, and that more than anything jarred her concentration.

When she finally stumbled across the slumbering ghost that was Ifrit, Quistis found herself on the verge of unconciousness once again. She hung grimly to the final thread of awareness, clinging stubbornly to it as the wails of his protests continued on. If she never had to hear Seifer Almasy scream like that again--strident and panicked and helpless, it would be too soon.

Ifrit came awake with a brush of thought, and uncoiled inside her with such force it stabbed a gasp through Quistis' clenched lips.

The guardian force exploded from her in a whirl of flames, riding a geyser of lava to its waiting prey while she struggled to stay conscious.

Ifrit was in his element here, surrounded by the fire and heat that was the core of his power, and he roared with the euphoria of his freedom. The men still in the act of ripping off Quistis' clothing cried out and scattered, pulling weapons as Dagan half-turned from Seifer, looking pissed.

The looming GF lashed out with an enormous clawed appendage, shredding one man cleanly through the torso. He fell to the ground in two separate pieces, mouth still locked in the death-frozen rictus of a scream.

A fireball sizzled through the chest of a second man, scorching through his ribcage to liquefy internal organs, burning him from the inside as he fell shrieking to his knees, then crumpled forward into the final position he would ever assume.

Dagan yanked his pistol from the holster on his right hip, and stabbed its barrel into Seifer's head. The blossom of cold against his temple cranked up the pounding behind his eyes another notch, and instinctively he tried to pull away, until Dagan looped his free hand around his skull and smashed him even more tightly up against that black hole of death.

Quistis blinked at him through the blood that streamed down her forehead.

She was calling Ifrit back; Seifer could tell that even as the monster gored another man through the stomach with one of his horns, taking the glistening coil of intestines with him as he pulled back, and his spine arched away from the wall as he gave one last desperate pull on his restraints.

He actually prayed for one fleeting moment that Dagan would lose his patience and pull the trigger--if he was dead Quistis would have only her own survival to worry about, and he wouldn't have to watch the one thing that would kill the tattered remnants of his psyche in a way that Ultimicea had never been able to do.

Adrenaline breeds incredible strength, or else one of the cuffs that held him was faulty; either way, when Seifer's biceps flexed against the obstacles that prevented him from saving her that one final time, something snapped with a report like a gunshot, and in the next instant he had Dagan by the throat.

Distracted by the retreating whirlwind that was Ifrit, the man turned too slowly to ascertain the noise before Seifer's fingers dented his windpipe.

He gagged as his throat closed over, and pulled the trigger.

It was the worst moment of Quistis' life, watching through the dissipating haze of Ifrit while the gun pushed into Seifer's head fired its killing steel into his brain. It was a slow motion cinema she watched now, the recoil of the gun against tissue-fragile skin that peeled apart as easily as air around the bullet's fatal path, the jerk of Seifer's head, the explosion of red in the fiery air, like another expanding fireball.

Vomit trickled into her mouth as she looked away, stomach rolling erratically.

The hollow click of a misfire drew her gaze back to the scene before her.

Dagan's gun dropped from his fingers as the bullet in its chamber failed to go off and Seifer strangled the life from his eyes, and in that moment Quistis went completely, bonelessly limp with relief as she realized his murder had been only her mind completing the only outcome she could imagine.

Seifer wasn't Seifer anymore, Quistis realized as she continued to watch; he was Edea's knight once more, that same madness burning hotter than a thousand suns in his eyes, his lips locked in the same murderous snarl she'd faced during the war. He'd gone completely feral, lips pulled back over teeth in a wolf's grimace that put fear into that cold man's eyes at last.

Seifer's gaze reflected death, and her stomach rolled again, because he'd come so far from this man that he'd been, from this creature that tortured and murdered without remorse--

"Seifer!" she croaked out, her voice far too weak to reach through the roaring of blood in his ears.

But something else touched him; some animal instinct that made him turn his head slowly and look at her, or maybe it was just that they were closer than she even wanted to imagine. Either way, the homicidal glow in his eyes slowly dimmed, and his hand loosened slightly--though not enough for the man to slip free.

"Seifer." Quistis whispered again.

His eyes begged something from her. Forgiveness maybe? She didn't know.

His voice boomed like Hyne's in the cavern where this drama unfolded, reverberating through her bones. "Tell him to get her down." Seifer said slowly, relaxing his fingers a fraction more, just enough to allow Dagan to speak as he indicated the lone survivor, on his knees on the cavern ground coughing up blood. "Do it now."

"Brandon--Brandon, do it." he gagged out through the pinhole of his throat.

The man staggered to his feet, dragging a shattered leg behind him. He produced a set of keys from one of the bodies on the ground and unlocked Quistis' cuffs with shaking hands, spitting more blood onto the rocky terrain, the spot of red pulsing unnaturally in the shimmering heat-glow of the cavern.

Quistis limped over to the discarded handgun, palming it and clearing the useless round, then turning and firing a bullet, surgically precise, between the eyes of the man who'd freed her.

She was a soldier first and foremost.

Seifer looked into the eyes of the man he held in the death grip of his fingers, and now his hand began to tremble just slightly, shivering against the cold marble of his flesh. This man felt like death in his palm, cold and evil and suddenly invincible. He felt like a child again, cowering under a table while the shadows from the closet circled him with murderous intentions.

"Why," Quistis said faintly, pausing to catch her breath, "did you kidnap us? What do you need…with Rinoa?"

The man, astonishingly enough, smiled. It looked more like a grimace, and it was so familiar to Seifer that a deep shudder of revulsion sizzled like electricity down his spine, shrink-wrapping his stomach around the column of his backbone.

"Still killing people, Seifer? You've always been good at that."

"I haven't killed anyone today." he said coldly. "Yet. Answer her question."

Quistis tucked the pistol into the waistband of her pants and picked up the set of keys, going to work on Seifer's remaining cuff. "We'll need to take him back to Garden with us."

"No."

"We need him as a prisoner, Seifer, not dead--this was an ambush. They planned this out, and we need to know what's going on. Laguna needs to be informed so he can put extra security on Rinoa."

"No." Seifer repeated, and she searched for that same madness in his eyes again, but didn't see it--there was just revulsion and a penetrating hatred that burrowed for miles under the first layer of his gaze.

His fingers tightened again.

"Seifer, no." Quistis said, and very softly laid one of her hands on his forearm, where the muscles stood out like steel cables.

It was a touch that defeated him, but not completely; the pressure of his fingers waned once more, but still he didn't let go.

"Seifer." She brushed hair from the adhesive puddle of blood that matted it to his face where the bullet that creased the side of his head had struck when they were first captured, and he looked from the prey held captive in the ruthless circle of his hand to her face. She saw indecision deepen the line through his forehead, a fleeting emotion through the pools of his eyes. "Seifer, please. We need him."

His face clenched one final time, then eased, and Quistis knew she had won.

* * *

Starlight Hotel

Balamb

Zell was pretty sure that if he were a less suave man, he would have crapped himself by now.

As it was, his insides seemed to have knotted themselves into an impressively complex loop, and Irvine had jammed his head full of so many hints and tips that every comment that leaked from between his lips sounded like something from a one and a half star chick flick.

At least the restaurant was nice--it had come highly recommended by both Squall and Irvine as a romantic get-away, and it hadn't disappointed him. Dripping sparkling chandeliers that cast the rainbow prisms of their light across his face and plush carpeting that nearly swallowed elegantly-clad feet, it boasted a view of nighttime Balamb guaranteed to score even the most hopeless of dorks--that would be Zell, according to Irvine--major points. And Bria's dress perfectly complimented the magical surroundings--or at least it had, until Zell had caused a dominoes-style collapse of several waiters, ending in an expensive entrée smeared across the front of the garment, red sauce blurring into the curve of her cleavage.

He still wasn't sure how he'd managed that. Then, typically enough, he'd rushed to assist and had only managed to upend a glass of wine in her lap and elbow her in the face--she still pressed a napkin to her bleeding lip, smiling at him through the white cloth patterned crimson with her blood.

_"Now Dincht, jest try and keep your big feet under the table, an' you should be all right. And don't call her 'dude.' And pull her chair out for her--and no, it ain't appropriate to jerk it out too far so she falls, no matter how funny it might seem." _

He buried his face in his hands as Irvine's voice lectured him once more. Hyne must be laughing pretty hard at him right now, because he'd somehow managed to do the precise opposite of everything Irvine had instructed him to do. It had all been an accident--even pulling the chair out too far, although if he were completely honest, that actually _had _been pretty funny.

He just needed to accept that she would never in a million years go out with him again, and take the rejection like a man.

"Zell, look--"

"Bria, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to do any of this, I'm sort of a klutz and I'm really nervous right now, but come on, just give me one more chance? Please? _Please_?!" Zell babbled wildly.

He could almost see Irvine dropping his face into his palms in complete frustration.

_Aww, crap. _he thought, disgusted with himself. _Why don't you just hand her your balls on a silver platter?_

She balled the napkin up in one hand and tossed it aside, laughing. It wasn't mocking laughter, to his great surprise, just warmly amused, as though they shared some private joke between them. "Actually, I was just going to suggest that maybe we go somewhere else. This place doesn't really seem to agree with you much. I think it might be bad luck or something."

He fell in love with her when she leaned an elbow on the table, propped her chin in one hand, and winked one gorgeous eye at him.

It felt a lot like swallowing too-hot food, the rubik's cube knot that was his emotions for her lodging in his throat, then sliding into a long and painful skid toward his stomach. He fumbled for his water glass and sent it flying with one flailing hand--but apparently she was beginning to predict his little accidents, because she caught it before it could spill and righted it with another smile, the kind that speared through him like lightning and crushed the breath in his chest into a miniscule cube.

"Yeah. Yeah, we should leave! That's a great idea!"

He shoved back from the table with too much enthusiasm and his whole chair tipped back, carrying him with a squawk of surprise into a messy pile on the floor.

Bria stood up and came around the table to assist him, dropping to her knees next to him while several patrons looked on. "Zell, did your mom forget to teach you how to walk when you were a kid?"

Her upside-down face smiled at him again.

He scratched his head. "Nah. I mean, I don't think so."

"That's called sarcasm, Dincht. Do you need a hand?" she asked, offering one to him.

_"Be spontaneous, Dincht. Women like that. Do something cute when she's not expectin' it. Touch her hair, give her a kiss--but only if things are goin' well and she's given you the 'sign.'"_

Bria's smile was a dazzling thing, brighter than the chandelier overhead. He smiled back, and with Irvine's words echoing in his head, reached up to lightly touch her cheek. It was a gentle caress, a moment of subtle intimacy between two people--or at least it would have been, except that his arm was too short, so instead his hand landed on her boob.

Zell froze.

Her smile snapped tight like a broken spring into a look of astonishment.

"Uh, sir?" a passing waiter said, shuffling to a halt and awkwardly trying not to look directly at the blatant display of physical affection. "I'm going to have to ask you not to do that. This establishment prides itself on having a certain amount of…class."

"Uh," Zell blurted out intelligently. "She's got…new implants! And she thought one of 'em popped, right? So she was just asking me to check and make sure it was still ok." _I'm never going to live this down._

_* * * _

Irvine broke into high-pitched laughter. It was a ridiculous laugh, strident and almost-feminine, and one that normally Zell made fun of. But right now he just didn't have the heart; sitting forlornly on Quistis' bed still dressed in a suit and now-askew tie, he whistled out a heavy sigh and dropped his face into his hands.

"So first you accidentally slammed the door in her face when you guys walked into the restaurant, then you made her fall when you pulled her chair out for her, then you caused a waiter to spill dinner all over her dress, and then you spilled wine in her lap and smacked her in the face, _and then _after all that, things were still going ok and she wasn't trying to scratch your eyes out, so you decided it was a good idea to fall out of your chair and grab her boob?" He broke into more guffaws. "Dincht, I gotta' hand it to you, man; you are a walkin' entertainment show, ya' know that?"

"Hey, it's not funny!"

Quistis, perched at her desk working quietly on her computer, had to smile a little even as she felt a knife of sympathy stab her heart for the poor guy. Zell was a great catch when you got past his rather creepy fondness for hot dogs; hilarious and warm and fiercely loyal like no one she'd ever met before. Any woman would be lucky to have such a man in her life.

However, she couldn't exactly blame Bria for being scared off after all that. In all honesty, she'd done amazingly well to make it to this point; they'd been out on about four dates or so now, and every single one had featured a string of typical Zell moments. It was a strong woman who could laugh off so many catastrophes. Quistis couldn't say that even she could have persevered like that after so many bad dates.

Not that she went on many dates period.

Her mind spiraled around toward Seifer, like it so often did these days, a whirlpool of green eyes and crimson-painted blond and the open-lipped snarl of a killer.

He should be holed up in his room right now, hiding out because the latex mold that hid his scar and the curly wig that concealed his trademark blond hair had been destroyed during that little episode in the fire cavern and replacements had not yet been made. _Should be, but instead he's probably lurking around somewhere looking to get himself killed. _

She should hate this man; he'd put her through the emotional wringer these past few months, and if Quistis hated anything, it was the balance of her organized little world spinning crazily out of whack, like a see-saw not weighted quite right. Seifer was a drug, the needle that injected poison into her system, highly addictive but completely fatal in the end.

She hadn't spoken to him since they'd limped from that hellhole carrying the unconscious Dagan between them. Maybe it was because she simply couldn't submit herself to that voice again, not when it followed her into slumber, hoarse from the screams of horror that were meant for her. It was her cowardice once again, weakness wrapped in the faux steel of her icy reputation.

It certainly wasn't because she'd forgotten what had happened. Those were images that would stay imprinted on her mind for a long, long time, the healing lattice of scratches that was her face a physical reminder of the ordeal every time she dared look in a mirror.

She still saw him dying. In her dreams, the gun didn't misfire; it blew out a section of his beautiful head, shorting out the spark of life in his eyes and spattering her face with bone splinters and brain matter. They were images intermingled with the memories of Matron's death, forming dark spirals of pictures that wrapped her brain like the chains of incarceration.

It was an apt comparison; their deaths imprisoned her in sleep when she only wanted to wake up to the emptiness of her room. A long time ago, that cold solitude had bothered her, but at least it wasn't filled with the scenes of their murders, played out over and over again.

"Quis, what am I gonna' _do_?!" Zell whined from the opposite side of her room.

She spun her chair to face him. "Apologize to her. It was an accident; she sounds like an understanding person. You've got nothing to lose."

"Jest try not to grab her other boob while you're doin' it."

Quistis shot him a look, and he tossed his hands up innocently, pasting a look of false concern on his face. Thrown into shadow beneath his hat, the twist of his features looked almost sincere, but not quite. "Hey, I'm jest tryin' to help a fellow man out. You gotta' admit, he could use it."

"I've completely blown it." Zell moaned, collapsing backward onto her bed.

She winced a little as his fall ruined her perfectly-creased covers, but let it pass. "I'm sure you haven't, Zell. Just explain things to her. Communication is important if you want a relationship with this woman."

"Man, I don't even know what I was thinking. Why would someone like her want me?"

"Maybe she has a short, big mouth man fetish."

"Irvine." Quistis said sternly. "Leave him alone. He feels bad enough as it is."

"Quis, you'd date me if you were a woman, wouldn't you?"

"Excuse me?"

"I mean--aw crap, you know what I meant."

"Not really." she replied dryly, crossing her arms over her chest. "I assume you didn't really mean to imply that I'm a man."

"Ya' see, Dincht, this is why you have such a problem with woman. Your mouth just opens. Ya' don't think first."

"I mean like…I know Quistis is a girl, right? I just don't really think of her as one. She's like a sister to me. She's…genderless, or something, you know?"

"Gee, thanks."

Irvine pantomimed digging a hole.

Quistis rolled her eyes as Zell gave him the finger. She loved her friends, but as men, maturity certainly wasn't one of their strong suits.

"I'm gonna' take him out for a few drinks, get his mind off what happened. You interested in comin,' Quis?"

She considered his offer for a split second. She'd never really been much of a drinker, but anything seemed a happy alternative to the cold bed and even colder dreams awaiting her. But she wasn't really in the mood for drunken Zell antics and bawdy drinking songs tonight, so with a regretful shake of the head she climbed to her feet and followed them to the door to say good-bye. She had plenty of coffee, after all, and with enough caffeine in her veins she ought to be able to fortify herself against the venomous lure of slumber.

Irvine gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek, Zell a crushing bear hug, and then they vanished down the hall, one of the cowboy's arms slung casually over his shorter companion's shoulders.

Quistis shut the door and returned to her computer.

Heavy knuckles rapped out a hollow rhythm on it only a second or so after she'd settled herself back in her chair.

"Forget something?" she asked before she'd even opened the door half-way, and in the startled second it took her to put a name to the familiar face, he'd shouldered his way inside.

"What are you doing?" Quistis demanded, shutting the door quickly and locking it behind her again. "Seifer, how many times do I have to remind you that you can't just wander around like that? Do you even understand what will happen to you if someone catches you?"

"I'm not a fucking moron." he snapped. "Do I look like Chicken Wuss to you?" He grabbed her by the elbow and swung her roughly onto the bed, where she bounced for a moment with the force of her landing. "Sit down. I'm going to talk to you, and you're going to fucking listen."

She attempted to stand, and he pushed her back. "I think you need to leave, Seifer. Right now."

"No. Sit down, Trepe. You've ignored me long enough. I'm fucking tired of sitting around waiting for you to notice me."

She stared down onto her tensely clasped hands, snarled in a marble-white knot in her lap. "Seifer, I apologize if I've--"

"Shut up." he interrupted her roughly, heart pounding like a drumbeat in his ears, desperate and hurried and pumping adrenaline like molten lead into his mouth. It burned his tongue, scraping along the taste buds until he couldn't even remember the flavor of anything else, and if he'd been scared that night on the cliffs a week and a half ago, he was fucking terrified now.

She did as she was told for once--probably just too startled to formulate a proper response, though he figured that wouldn't last long. He had maybe a few seconds before the real Quistis Trepe returned, all indignant fire because he'd told her what to do instead of the other way around for once.

"Do you still love Squall? At all?"

Surprise bloomed in her blue eyes. "As a brother, yes. But nothing more than that. What I felt for him once was…misplaced, that's all." _And it's nothing like the way I feel about you. _

He felt sweat beading on his upper lip, little droplets of moisture that burned with hellfire heat, brutal and searing and distracting. He wiped them away with a flick of his hand. _Do you love me? _

His throat clenched around the question, tongue stalling like a motor wheezing out its final breaths of life. That was really what it all came down to, wasn't it? He loved her. A thousand years and heartbreaks later, Seifer Almasy had fallen for the bossy little blue-eyed girl who cried when he kicked over her sand castles and made him rescue her dolls from greedy ocean waves.

His hands curled into anxious fists. _Just say it, you damn pansy. _

"Quistis--" His tongue failed him again, and he gagged on her name like it was a churning ocean wave of acid.

She looked gently at him, and her serene beauty reminded him again that he didn't deserve to have her, that he shouldn't even try. Well, fuck that. He'd tried staying away from her, and he just couldn't do it. Call him weak, call him pathetic; he didn't care. The only thing that really mattered to him anymore was that frail-looking porcelain hand clasped in his, guarded forever against the dangers of the world.

And that was the final puzzle piece clicking into place for him, the absolute certainty that he was head-over-fucking-heels for this woman. A man like Seifer didn't bestow such selflessness on anyone; a man like Seifer wasn't the altruistic martyr willing to give his life for just anyone. He loved Raijin and Fuuijin; he'd eat a bullet for either one of them. But he didn't go to sleep thinking about the scent of their hair, and he wouldn't offer himself up to the mind-raping horror that was Edea for them.

For Quistis, he'd go to that dark place again. If it meant he could save her, he'd give himself back to Edea, and gratefully.

"Seifer, what did you come here to say?"

He scratched the back of his neck and looked away. Was he turning into a damn Chicken Wuss too? All fumbling failed confessions and awkward looks; he felt like the world's nerdiest virgin about to lose it to the prettiest girl in school.

"Trepe," he barked, the word short and harsh like the rattle of a machine gun, his legs carrying him forward in a half-lunge that left her huddling instinctively away from him, as though she thought he might bite her. He grabbed her hands in his, a little clumsily, and looked her straight in the face. "I--" _I want you to look at me and read my fucking mind, like I used to swear you could do sometimes back when I was picking on Squall in the back of your classroom. I want you to say it first, because I thought I was fucking done being a coward, but apparently not. _

"Seifer, just say what you need to."

"Fine." He glanced away, because he couldn't say it while staring into her eyes after all. "I love you."

Her fingers turned rigid in his. "I came here to tell you what I should have said last week, because this way there's no room for you to make any excuses. You can't pretend you're just imagining things anymore. You heard me, Instructor. I love you."

She heard the words, but somehow they didn't quite register in her brain. They circled endlessly around each other, chasing one another down into the storm drain of her mind, burrowing through the silt of other thoughts that now seemed useless.

Quistis wanted to believe this was some ploy of his to tempt her into bed, some poetry of the tongue meant to get him in her pants. But the coarse admission was no honeyed seduction, and the emerald gaze stabbed apprehension into hers when it eventually flickered back to her face. He reminded her of that little boy she'd chased down a warm beach under Matron's watchful eye a long time ago, and her face softened into the ghost of an almost-smile.

His fingers still wrapped hers, and they felt so warm, so…Quistis couldn't even describe it. She'd spent so long building a wall of solitude around herself that this chink in the armor of the bricks that constructed it scared her.

So he loved her. Seifer Almasy had fallen in love with someone other than himself…and it was her.

She didn't really know how to feel about that. Quistis supposed the real question here was whether or not she loved him back, but how could she really answer that? How was she qualified to say what love was? She'd spent her entire adult life grading papers and training children hardly younger than herself to kill people. Love was not a part of that equation.

But…and now her mind flashed to the awful sensation of watching him die in that split second before Dagan's gun misfired, to Balamb's rippling fields where he lay on a bed of crushed grass while the sun leaked cheerful orange into cotton bud clouds…to his callused hands framing her cheeks, and his warm breath fanning across the curve of her neck.

She thought of saying 'I'm sorry, Seifer, I don't love you; now please leave,' and couldn't do it. She was more afraid than she'd ever been in her life; no battlefield melody of gunshots and bombs could amplify her pulse this way. It beat hard and fast in the side of her neck, like a bird trying to escape, and she wondered with fleeting curiosity if his was doing the same.

"Seifer--"

He loomed broad and imposing above her, but there was nothing intimidating about him now. She didn't see the bully now, just a young man who was probably just as terrified as she, though he'd managed to compose his features into their usual stern set.

She stood up, releasing his hands.

This was his dismissal; she saw the certainty flash in his eyes. For a moment she really thought of just sending him away, but she wasn't strong enough to keep pretending anymore. So instead, she smoothed her fingertips over his scar, remembering a man with the same scar and how long ago she'd wanted to touch him like this. Before he found Rinoa, before she burrowed under the skin of the skeleton man that was Seifer Almasy and realized just how much more there was to him.

"Seifer--"

He closed his eyes.

Quistis brushed her hands tentatively over his shoulders. Then she stood on tiptoes and gently kissed the disfigurement she'd just traced with her fingers, her mouth lingering against his skin. "I am a coward, you know. You were right, Seifer. And I'm sorry."

His eyes snapped open. "No. No you're not."

"Yes I am." she said with quiet certainty. _Which is why…I'm sending you away. _

Maybe she was strong enough to pretend after all. Unexpected tears weaved an excruciating pattern through her lashes. "Go back to your room, Seifer. Be careful; don't let anyone see you."

He didn't move.

One of the tears escaped and ran down her cheek. Aghast, Quistis turned away and walked over to her bed to fix the blankets Zell had mussed, praying he hadn't noticed.

But either he had, or he was just plain masochistic, because he followed.

"Why." It wasn't a question; the word emerged flat, stagnant when it rolled off his tongue.

_Because look at Rinoa and Squall; look what's happened to them. Squall's destroyed because of what they shared. Because it's a lot easier to be alone. It's not nearly as frightening as having something and knowing you can lose it so easily. _

"Because." she said, sniffling a little to her horror and quickly wiping at her eyes.

Seifer sighed and set his hands on her shoulders. "Quistis, don't fucking cry. Please." His arms slid lightly around her neck and she felt him press his cheek to the back of her head.

Her cheeks dried quickly; she was, after all, Quistis Trepe, and displays of weakness were for people far less disciplined than she.

"What are you so damn afraid of?"

It was a stupid question; he understood all too well the kind of terror that must be eating away at her, but if he had managed to overcome it, why couldn't she? All right, so maybe he hadn't exactly _overcome_ it, because it still sat there chewing away at his gut like a damned rat, but he'd at least conquered it enough to make it this far. That was more than could be said for her.

"Rinoa…and Squall…"

"A fairytale princess and her knight in shining armor?" Seifer cut in derisively. "You want to compare us to them?"

"I'm not comparing us." she replied, her hands shaking on top of the blankets she smoothed. "I'm saying look at what's happened to them. Squall loves her so much he's completely devastated by what's happened; it's like his feelings for her burned out everything else inside him, and now there's nothing left. If they couldn't get their happy ending, why should anyone else believe they can?"

"Life isn't a damn fairytale, Quistis."

"I _know _that." she snapped, frustrated. He could piss her off so easily sometimes…And now his shoulders were shaking in laughter, of all things. She could feel him trembling, and whipped around, suddenly enraged. "You think this is funny? What's funny about _any _of this?"

"I've always been the only one who could ever really make you lose your temper, huh, Instructor?"

"I'm glad that amuses you." she said coldly.

"You get two little spots of red right here, and," He touched one side of her face, then the other, "right here when you're pissed."

She pulled her face from his hands, glaring up at him.

He leaned down so their noses nearly touched, his eyes boring like lasers into hers. "I'll stop teasing you if you give me a kiss."

The flush of anger brightened into one of embarrassment, and he smirked. "Come on, Instructor. You've already had my tongue in your mouth. What's one more time? It's good practice for tutoring your students. A little incentive for them to study harder."

She blushed harder. "If you're in any way implying that I--"

He sneaked a quick peck on her mouth, jerking his head back before she could punch him and leaving her sputtering.

"You're an overly persistent jerk." Quistis lectured him.

Seifer shrugged. "Yeah."

"I wouldn't kiss you if you were the last man on earth."

"Too bad. 'Cause I'm not leaving until you do." he replied, inspecting his nails casually.

"Get out of my room. That's blackmail."

"I think it qualifies more as bribery. But whatever, Instructor."

"Seifer, get out."

He dropped his hand, his eyes moving from his nails back to her face. Something moved through the clear jade of that gaze, like the elusive glimpses of fish in a dark pond. She thought he might be bending at last, but she should have known better; Seifer's spine was armored steel, bulletproof and completely unyielding.

So instead of sighing heavily in defeat at last and moving to her door, he sat down on her bed. Then he threaded his hands together and held them clasped between his knees, watching her.

She felt like prey, observed by a very patient, very large jungle cat, hungry but willing to wait for the perfect moment to strike.

Quistis clenched her jaw and moved around her room attending to small tasks that didn't really need to be done, straightening a book here, brushing non-existent dust from a nightstand there, perfectly aligning her computer's mouse with the corner of the pad it sat on. Her pulse beat crazily the entire time, because he was still there, still watching, and if the burning lines his eyes traced along her back were any indication, he hadn't blinked in several minutes.

Finally she threw up her hands in aggravation, planting them on her hips as she spun to face him. "If I kiss you, you are to leave my room immediately, and you're not allowed to come back--five minutes from now or five days from now, unless I give you my express permission."

His eyes didn't move, but his lips twitched toward that arrogant Seifer smirk she'd seen so many times beaming at her from the back of her classroom. "Does it need to be written?"

"_Yes_." Quistis snapped, crossing her arms. "Written, dated, and signed by myself and a witness."

"Fine." He stood, and the room suddenly seemed to shrink around them, plastic wrapped around the space between their bodies that appeared to Quistis not nearly large enough. "But you still have to pay up on your end of the deal."

"Obviously."

The smirk spread. _Like an infection. _Quistis thought unkindly. "You're not moving."

"Neither are you." Anxiety struck a solid hammer blow to her chest, and she tried not to fold around it, tried not to collapse into the echoing void that was the panic eating away at her internally.

"_You're _supposed to kiss _me_, Trepe. The longer you stand there the longer I stay."

She took a step forward, small and shuffling and far too unsure and meek to belong to Quistis Trepe. His face burned unnaturally warm beneath her hands where she pressed them against either side of his face, and his features melted under the trembling flutter of her fingertips--not significantly, but somehow his entire face became softer when she touched him. His scar faded back into the skin of his forehead, still there but far less pronounced then it seemed to be when he was agitated.

His eyes slipped closed.

Quistis stood there for a long, long moment with his face cradled between her hands and her heart trying to escape the cage of her chest, wondering how this man had managed to burrow so thoroughly under the winter freeze of her ice queen persona. This was not meant to happen; she'd never really planned to feel something like this for anyone. She'd dreamed vaguely of it at times, yes, but it had always been a cozy dream, warm like a favorite blanket. The reality of it was a bucket of water to the face, liquid terror injected into the veins.

She pressed her mouth against his, long enough to make it count but not so long that she allowed herself to get caught up in the sensation. It was perhaps five seconds of contact between their lips, and then she pulled back--but Seifer's hands gripped her waist now, and she wasn't strong enough to defeat him in a purely physical power struggle.

He didn't force himself on her; there was no intrusive entrance of his tongue, no inappropriate touching attempted by his strong hands. Just his mouth on hers, innocently intimate, and whether it was because of his grasp or her own weakness, Quistis couldn't pull away this time.

She was the one to tentatively take the embrace farther, slipping her tongue out to hesitantly caress his bottom lip until he opened his mouth. Her hands left his face and stumbled shyly up his chest, tangling in the collar of his shirt. He walked them both back toward the bed, pulling Quistis with him to sit down--but her weight hit him harder than Seifer expected and they both fell, she sprawling on top of him, their foreheads bumping painfully.

"Fuck!"

She blushed fire-engine red, heat like a furnace building in her cheeks, and it made him smile again as he looked up at her. His hands slid to the small of her back, and he pulled her face down to lightly kiss the tip of her nose.

Quistis looked away from him. "That was one kiss. That was our deal."

Seifer groaned, closed his eyes, and dropped his head back onto her bed. "Come on, Trepe! Give me a fuckin' break!"

He pried one eye open in her direction, just a slit, but it was enough to see her lips, rose-petal soft and damp from his own mouth, curved in a faint smile. "Are you fucking with me?"

Quistis sighed. "Seifer, I highly doubt the wisdom of pursuing this."

"Because of Puberty Boy and Rinoa?"

"Yes." she said, ignoring his slight toward Squall for the moment. "Because of them. And because of me."

His face held steady, but somehow she could sense hurt swimming below the taut control he forced his muscles into. "You're not in love with me. This is the it's-not-me-it's you shit, isn't it? Give me a fucking break, Quistis. I don't need you to sugar-coat this. I can take it like a damn man."

But maybe he did need her to gloss over the rejection after all, because his stomach hurt like he'd just taken six inches of cold steel to the belly, and he felt splinters of his heart break off and pierce his lungs. Then again, Seifer doubted 'I'm sorry, but it really _is _me and not you' would make him feel much better.

Quistis remained silent, and he rolled an eye cautiously in her direction. "You're not saying anything."

She didn't meet his gaze.

"Do you have feelings for me or not?" She did--although after the war Seifer had been far more concerned with purging Ultimicea's last few shadows from his mind rather than pursuing women, he knew he hadn't lost his touch that much. Quistis was attracted to him, and on more than just a physical level, he was pretty sure. He liked to think that love factored somewhere into her thoughts of him, but in his more terrified moments a million doubts crowded his head, all whispered in that voice that sounded suspiciously like hers. When that voice dragged its poison claws through his mind, he wasn't sure of anything anymore--except that happiness didn't come to men like Seifer Almasy, and Quistis would probably take on the Trepies as her own personal harem before ever returning his feelings.

"Seifer--"

"Look at me." he demanded, grabbing her chin in the vise grip of his fingers.

"Seifer, I…I love you." Her pulse hammered like gunfire in her ears, like the sonic boom of a nuclear blast that echoes on for days. She hadn't really meant to say it, but somehow in the moment it had slipped out, and now she knew he would never forget it. "I do. But--"

"No. If you do, then stop making so many damn excuses."

Every ounce of breath fled Quistis' chest on her next exhalation. "It's a lot easier to just ignore this, Seifer."

He snorted. "Yeah. Sort of like ignoring cancer."

She paused for a moment. "Am I to take that as you comparing me to some sort of cancerous growth?"

"Take it however you want. But you're really starting to piss me off. I feel like you're jerking me around on a fucking chain. 'Sure Seifer, I love you, but I'd rather you pine over me than actually have me.' Are you that used to being on a damn pedestal?"

She looked shocked, and a little hurt, and he started to regret his words. "Is that what you think this is about?"

He sighed and shut his eyes again, head starting to pound. "No. I'm just frustrated. You drive me nuts sometimes."

She sat up as much as she could with his arms still circling her, glaring down at him. "Then why would you want to be with me?"

"Because," he said, deadly serious now, looking her hard in the eyes. "Because you're beautiful and brave and you just want to be so fucking perfect, and you're not. Almost, but not quite. Because you're the only person who really understands me somehow, and you never gave up on me, even when I wanted you too."

She fell silent, digesting that for a long moment.

"And because you have a great ass. And your tits aren't bad either."

The smirk re-appeared, full blown Seifer, and she hit him lightly in the shoulder even though the expression speared warm tendrils of fire through her.

"You want to kiss me again?" he asked, trapping her face just a few centimeters from his own, his breath stroking warm spirals across her cheeks.

"No, I don't." Quistis replied, trying to look haughty.

"Yeah you do." he said, kissing one side of her neck and then the other.

"Seifer--"

And just like that, the entire world changed. It was a sound she'd heard numerous times before that entered her dorm room, a squawk of static followed by his voice--tinged slightly metallic with electronics, blandly neutral. "This is Squall; B. Garden is under attack. We have a team of unidentified intruders on the prison level, and possibly another strike force somewhere inside Garden. All students and instructors to their positions. Repeat: this is Squall, and we are under attack. You know what to do."

Quistis bolted up from Seifer's chest, his hands slithering off her as she ripped herself free.

He watched her grab her whip from the stand beside the bed, thinking how odd it was to be on the other side of the table now, the defender and not the offender.

The last attack on Balamb Garden had been led by him.

"Stay here, Seifer." Quistis barked at him, sprinting to her door. It was her instructor's voice she used on him, the one that brooked no argument, the one that could cut an unruly student down in his path with just the barest flick of her barbed wire tongue.

He sat up on her bed, cupping his knees in his palms. _The prison level. Someone had come for Dagan. _

She spent the barest minute probing him with her eyes, making sure that just this once he would actually obey. "I mean it, Seifer."

The door in front of her exploded inward, a geyser of splinters that pushed Quistis back like some turbulent brown waterfall.

Seifer was already moving, hurtling feet-first into the leading intruder; his boots slammed air from the man's chest as Quistis rolled back to her feet, whip snapping out only a split second after she'd gained her balance, its tip claiming the snout of a weapon and jerking it from the hands of the man shouldering it. Her next flick of the wrist unwound it from the gun's barrel; the next wrapped barbed steel around the man's thoat, and one sharp yank sprayed the air with red.

His head bounced on her carpet, wide-eyed and gape-mouthed.

Seifer crouched and sprang like an animal.

Quistis head-butted a fourth attacker, then before he could fully recover his wits, spun her back into his stomach as she fisted a hand in his gear and flipped him neatly over one shoulder.

A boot heel to his throat cracked his windpipe and shattered the final death gasp that swelled from between his lips.

She left him to die while Seifer took care of the last man, one strong fist punching through the man's thin armor into the vulnerability of his solar plexus; Quistis heard something snap with a sharp report like a gunshot.

The man crumpled to his knees, and Seifer sent him spinning to the floor with a boot to the temple that probably would have caused brain damage, if he weren't already a goner.

"You ok?"

She nooded, retrieving her weapon. "Fine. Why did they come here?"

He grabbed her by the elbow, not roughly, but hard enough that she knew he meant business. "We're going to find out. This is the fourth time you've been targeted, Trepe. Something's going on, and we're going to figure out what the hell it is."

* * *

The guards had already been killed and Dagan's prison left yawning emptily into the basement's inky well mouth of darkness when Quistis and Seifer arrived. It had taken them precious time to arrive without anyone spotting the ex-knight, and with Garden under high alert it had been no easy task.

"Shit." Seifer snarled, punching the empty cell's steel door. The skin of the knuckles on his right hand fractured and wept blood, crimson tears that flared out into tributaries. He didn't even notice; anger sparked too violently through his veins, electrically hot and adrenaline pumping.

"That's that, I guess." she said quietly, watching him as he slammed his hands into the pockets of his pants and hunched in on himself, looking as surly as she'd ever seen him.

"No it's not."

"Seifer." She rested a hand lightly on his forearm, feeling the muscles twitch and jump below her fingertips. "There's nothing we can do right now. We need to get you back into hiding before someone--"

"I know where to find him." His clenched jaw ground painfully, teeth scraping with the harsh grate of nails on chalkboard. His eyes flashed killing fire, an emerald death promise--distant with memories, heavy with some inner turmoil.

She waited while he tried to speak.

He couldn't quite move the words past his mouth for a long, long time; slow like molasses, they balked at the very tip of his tongue and froze to the taste buds there.

It was a taste that combined alcohol and death.

"Dagan Bergenson is my dad."


	17. Chapter 16

**A/N: Unfortunately, I'm afraid this is going to be my last chapter of this story. No, this isn't the end of the story--I've decided to discontinue it because I've spent a lot of time reading back over it this past week or so, and I'm not happy with what I've done. And if you just read that and began plotting my demise, don't worry--I'm just kidding. I do want to explain why I've been slower about updating than normal, though, and to warn you guys that this trend will probably continue until the weather warms up a little. I'm not experiencing any writer's block, so don't worry--that's not the problem. In fact, if anything I have to pace myself with this story, because when I sit down to work on it I tend to wind up in front of the computer for hours writing like a maniac. Anyway, I live in an older apartment with a crap heating system that takes forever to warm up the room and is insanely expensive to run all the time--so as a poor person, I have compromised and gotten a space heater for my bedroom, which works great and keeps the heating bill down. Unfortunately, the computer is in the living room, and it's FREEZING. As much as I love writing this story, it's hard to concentrate on plot when you're teeth are chattering and you can't feel your fingers. We have had a couple of warm days that have made sitting in the living room bearable, though, so hopefully that will continue and I can have an update out soon. Thank you for reading, and I'd really appreciate some feedback! **

**Chapter Sixteen**

Train

Galbadian Countryside

His fingers bled sweat into the palm of her hand.

It was the stranger that sat next to her now, the one with the curling dark hair and smooth forehead, but the hands were his, holding the hard pockets of calluses and wrapping her fingers in a warmth Quistis hadn't yet figured out how to duplicate.

The train was relatively empty at this time of night; it was the last run of the day, and Seifer and Quistis had the car to themselves save for one lone older man at the other end reading a newspaper. Outside, the sun slid into a fiery demise behind a distant hilltop, shooting out starburst flares of red, like reaching fingers groping for some final redemption.

Seifer's heel drummed a staccato rhythm on the bare carpet beneath their feet.

Quistis slid her free hand over his knee and squeezed. "We don't have to do this, you know."

He didn't look at her, staring instead out the window, the sun's death reflected in his eyes.

She brushed a few curls from the nape of his neck.

His grip tightened on her hand, but he still didn't say anything, and she knew this was the closest Seifer would ever come to asking for comfort. His anxiety seeped like noxious gas from the pores of his skin, trapping the reek of fear in the shining gold waterfall of her hair. She felt tension in the knotted muscle of his shoulder where she laid her head, and the sweet gentle voice of the woman who'd been her mother circled her brain.

_"Seifer had a younger brother. A few months before his mother brought him here, there was an accident. I don't know the exact details of it; she wouldn't tell me. But essentially the story was that his younger brother drowned, and they blamed Seifer for it. His father refused to have anything to do with him after that; in fact, Almasy is his mother's maiden name. And finally, his mother just decided she couldn't look at him the same anymore. I don't know what his home life was like before his brother's death, but he'd obviously been abused when Cid and I took him in. He had bruises…everywhere." _

Seifer, unlike the rest of them, still had his family; they just hadn't wanted him. Had despised him, in fact, judging by the way Dagan had looked at him, completely, emotionally devoid at the thought of putting a bullet into his own child's brain.

It would have destroyed a weaker man; how could someone still function correctly, knowing the man who'd once bent over a wailing infant flashing the million-watt brilliance of a smile that is a shared trademark of all new daddies, knowing this man was only all too willing to order the rape of one of the most important people in your life? Knowing this man could put two inches of steel in your brain and then eat lunch as though the life he'd created with another human being mattered less than the piece of shit clinging to his boot heel.

Quistis shut her eyes. _Seifer…Seifer, I don't know what to say. _

How did you mend something like that with words? Put simply, you just couldn't. And because looking at him right now just made her want to cradle him in her arms away from everything that might hurt him, and because the knowledge that she couldn't affected Quistis like a punch to the gut, she simply closed her eyes.

And basked in the warmth of his solid body next to her, thinking of long-ago beaches and childish laugther, and just how far two ignorant young people had traveled in a world of so many uncertainties.

Several eye blinks of eternity later, Seifer roused her.

She came to her feet with her fingers still tucked in his, and they exited the train hand in hand, like one of any thousand young couples taking a romantic evening train ride through rolling fields and forestland. The train's doors hissed shut behind them, and then in a shrill whistle-blast of belching steam, it lurched into action once again, leaving the two behind to plunge straight into the descending red cape of sunset.

Deling City hadn't changed much--draped in its finery of twinkling lights, an illumination that exploded like the sun in their eyes after the relative dimness of the train, it winked cheerful promises of entertainment, a deceptive gloss hiding the city's stinking vagrants drowning in their bottles in rat-infested back alleys. It was a beautiful city for the most part, but like every big city it had its crime and its fair share of…interesting characters. Quistis never carried a purse there for that reason, and kept a close eye on her wallet. Not that she really carried a purse anywhere else either, except in the case of special occasions.

Seifer dropped her hand as they mingled with the city's jostling crowds, then seized it once more when he spotted a man old enough to know better ogling the pretty young blonde SeeD. He stabbed a brutal glare in the man's direction, ignoring her slightly amused look. "Let's find a hotel to hole up in for a few hours. We'll pay him a visit later tonight. It'll give me a chance to take this shit off." He scratched at the sweaty latex coating his forehead again, something he'd been doing even more frequently than usual during their train ride here. Quistis suspected it was beginning to turn into a nervous tic.

The city streets formed one continuous flow of motion--to someone like Quistis, who spent most of her time holed up in the constrictive quarters of either her dorm or classroom, it was an intriguing river of motion and sound. And also a dangerous one, a ripple of bodies that could hide any manner of perils. She kept a sharp predator's eye on their surroundings, Seifer's fingers still entangled around hers with the strength of steel bars.

They had to wander only a short distance before finding a hotel tucked back from the main street, a well-lit building stabbing fingers of gold into a spreading puddle on shiny black pavement. It was an illumination that turned the blue-green of his stranger's eyes into blazing jewels, million-faceted gems strained around the edges by the fault line cracks of stress.

His long coat dogged Seifer's heels, slinking along behind him like an obedient pet.

It was an innocent scene that flickered uncomfortable images across Quistis' mind, the soundless cinema of his own submission to the sorceress playing through her brain. The most arrogant student she'd ever taught, who'd constantly bucked her rules and thwarted authority at every opportunity, had bent his knee to that woman while she held tight to him with her poison claws.

Quistis remembered parade floats and the jingle of elaborate costumes--and the emerald madness roaring through his fever-bright gaze like consuming fire.

She glanced down at his hand, thinking how once upon a time he'd tried to kill her with it. It had been the vessel for the cold steel that sought her life, and the eyes banded now with pinstripes of gold had looked straight through her--like she was nothing, an obstacle, but one hardly considered a challenge. Just one more bug to squash beneath his boot.

If anyone had told Quistis then that she would one day find herself walking hand in hand through the jostling crowds of Deling City looking to rent a hotel room with that man, she might have laughed.

She didn't now.

Seifer slammed open the hotel's door, finally dropping her hand at last. She stood in the doorway for just a moment watching him stalk through the entrance, shaking her head. He was supposed to be someone else now, but his flair for dramatic entrances and the liquid, muscular grace of his stride were still pure Seifer. Maybe it was just Quistis that noticed it; she'd spent a good couple years of her life studying the ex-knight after all, trying to figure out just which layer of him to peel up first to reveal the potential she knew brewed inside him.

He sensed her hesitation, and spun back around. "You coming?"

A faint breeze pushed hair in front of Quistis' eyes. She'd worn it down today, loose and shiny like a golden waterfall over the shoulders, lightly perfumed and achingly beautiful to his eyes in this place of bad memories.

His heart squeezed in his chest.

The last time he'd visited this place, she'd been his enemy.

Quistis smiled at him, and it was brighter than the final cherry glow of sunset, brighter than the expanding mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

He marveled at just how much of a damn pansy he had become lately--but somehow with those gentle lips curving in his direction and her eyes capturing shattered prisms of sunlight under their surfaces, it didn't seem to matter quite as much.

_That's because she makes you weak. Quistis Trepe will be your downfall, Seifer Almasy. You have let her crawl into your mind, the same way you let me. You are a weak man, and eventually you will pay for it. _

Her voice hit him in the gut like a steel fist.

He gasped, very faintly, but something flickered in her eyes anyway. He tried not to fold around the impact, tried not to crumble in on himself like his body suddenly threatened to do.

Quistis stepped forward, looking concerned. "Se--Jace?"

"I'm fine." he said briskly, turning away from her.

He really wished that bitch would stop intruding on his life like this.

* * *

Blue Moomba Hotel

Deling City

He emerged from the bathroom wearing a layer of condensation like a halo, and nothing else.

Quistis glanced up from the bed with a smile on her face, an expression that vanished like mist under searing sunlight. The pink lips bowed into an 'o' of surprise, the pale cheeks bursting into flame under his amused gaze; she threw her hands up instinctively to cover her face, giving an uncharacteristic squeak of surprise. "Seifer!"

"Can you believe there isn't a single fucking towel in there? Way for the hotel to provide their patrons with 'every possible comfort.'" he mimicked, quoting the annoying, overly-cheerful man at the front desk who'd checked them in. "Anyway, shower's free. And if you want to dry off before putting your clothes back on, feel free to use me. Or walk around naked."

The fire in her cheeks had spread to her entire face now, splashing livid red in all directions like pulsing veins through marble.

"Seifer, would you please put your clothes back on?"

He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned a shoulder against the frame of the bathroom's entrance, smirking. She really was too damn cute when she was embarrassed. "I'm not cold, but thanks anyway for your concern."

Seifer could tell she was trying her best to maintain an air of professional, detached courtesy--while looking everywhere but at him. It made him shake with laughter that a woman who could wade knee-deep into gore and entrails without blinking turned into a stuttering little girl when confronted with the male body.

He had no such hang-ups. He'd molded his physique into a well-muscled tribute to masculinity, and though he'd lost some weight after the war, he still considering himself a walking wet dream--his arrogance had always been his, even if his mind hadn't always been, and Ultimicea would never take that from him.

He walked over to the bed and sat down next to her to begin dressing. Quistis shaded her eyes with a hand and looked away, noticeably tense where his bare, wet shoulder grazed hers. He smirked again and leaned over to grab his pants from the bedroom floor, making sure he pressed his wet body up against hers in the process.

Teach her to ignore him.

She jumped a little, like she'd just accidentally set her hand down on a red-hot burner.

Seifer slid his ankles into his pants and stood up to slither the rest of the way into them, the zipper's rasp a metallic sting along the senses. He could still sense her behind him, probably with her bright-red face buried in her hands, and so, Seifer being Seifer, instead of leaving Quistis alone, he turned toward her.

And sprang with animal grace into her arms, slamming her down onto the bed with an undignified yelp.

She was fire underneath him, a warm, bright center in the middle of his cold, cold world. He pinned her wrists gently and leaned in, letting his eyes drift closed.

The lips that met his were just as warm as the rest of her, stroking flames through his nerve endings, the sensation of her touch congealing as a warm, hard knot in the pit of his gut.

How could one person be so damn warm? Seifer wondered, pulling back, a little flushed as he climbed off her. He'd meant to embarrass her, and instead he ended up the flustered one. It really pissed him off that she could do that to him.

Quistis sat up, cheeks pink. "We should be leaving soon. I'll go clean up."

"Need any help?" he offered. "That's a lot of hair to wash all on your own."

She slammed the door in reply, and he decided to take that as a no.

Seifer wondered absently what sleeping with her would be like as he pulled his shirt over his head. A lot of blushing and attempts to keep her eyes averted from the action, he assumed--which was almost cute, in her own frustrating way. Seducing Quistis would be an entirely different endeavor from the other women whose pants he'd charmed his way into; probably futile and pointless, a lot like banging his head against a wall.

He did want to sleep with her of course--he was a young man with all the raging hormones that entitled, but it was so much more than past lusts. He wanted to claim every inch of her as his--he wanted to explore every silky expanse of skin, discover new curves and drink in the faint perfume of her skin, lay against her as close as two people could possibly get. They were thoughts he didn't want to dwell too long on, because doing so reminded him of the sappy direction his musings of her had begun to take lately, and Seifer could only draw one conclusion from that.

He was turning into a damn woman.

Seifer scowled and climbed to his feet. _Fucking Trepe. _

He crossed to the other side of the room, where he'd laid his coat-not the trench coat of old, not the leader of the disciplinary committee's authoritative silver and red, and not the traitor's tattered reminder of his own worst failure, but black and leather, and long enough to flap nearly against his ankles when he moved. It smelled crisp and new, with none of the old ghosts hanging around it.

But wrapped carefully inside away from her prying eyes and others who might become suspicious was an old companion, the quicksilver shine of its steel wrapped in the embrace of the traitor's frayed red and silver. It was only the faded strawberry cream of old blood and the dirty gray of an ugly winter sky now, but it was Seifer Almasy, and not Jace Keeling.

He unfurled it almost reverently, like a soldier unfolding his country's flag.

Tonight he would be Seifer Almasy, just for his father.

He looked toward the bathroom door one final time, listening to the rhythmic tapping of shower water hitting the tub, pooling at her feet, bubbling up around her toes, pushing up like elongated diamonds between them. If he listened hard enough, Seifer could catch the faint music of her humming, joining the shower's drumbeat in his own personal symphony. Sweet, and slightly off-key, like a happy child.

She'd sounded like that a long time ago, and he smiled just slightly thinking about it.

When Quistis emerged from the bathroom modestly dressed, steam still wisping gently from her arms, he was already gone.

Bergenson Manor

Deling City

He was dressed in his old coat, free of any protective disguise, sitting behind his father's desk with Hyperion laid out on the shiny wood like an offering when Dagan walked into the room.

The lights flashed on, like a nuclear explosion of sunlight, and Seifer barely even blinked. His smile was an ugly thing, tight and bitter, stetched thin like flesh over a starving man's bones.

Father and son studied each other without familial acknowledgement, just old hatreds and accusations that simmered like boiling water between them.

"Hello Seifer." Dagan said coldly, breaking the glacial chill that formed the wall of ice that separated them. "Didn't you take enough of my family the first time around? Or did you come here to kill my wife too?"

And just like that, for perhaps the second or third time in his life, Seifer's entire world came crashing down around him. His hand closed around Hyperion's comforting form as his father half-turned toward the door, as her voice, laughing and carefree, echoed up the stairs, as his entire existence contracted to one painful little point.

The little boy still inside him that remembered her bedtime story voice and the hand that smoothed hair from his forehead screamed "_Mom!_" as the highly skilled mercenary he was now swung with all his strength at his father's neck.

Dagan swept beneath the blow, but just barely, and it smashed through the wall where his skull had been a moment before. He lowered his head and lunged, burying himself in Seifer's gut, driving them both toward the floor where he could assume the dominant position. But his son, younger, less experienced, was faster, stronger, and--to his immense surprise--better. Seifer fisted a hand in Dagan's collar and plunged backward, carrying the motion through, dropping to his back and slamming booted feet into his father's stomach at the last moment, flipping the older man over the top of him onto the desk with a terrific crash of splintering wood and shattering paperweights.

"Dagan?" she screamed, and it was a shrill, frightened voice, more high-pitched and far less soothing than he remembered.

He whipped around toward the door just as her slender figure filled it, backlit by the dimmer illumination of the hallway like an angel surrounded by some fuzzy, ethereal glow.

The hand she clapped over her mouth was thin and shaking. She looked so much smaller than he remembered, and with shorter hair…but the eyes were the same color as his, and so much more kind.

Seifer felt like she'd stabbed him. He'd researched his father…read that he and his wife had split several years ago…she wasn't supposed to be here, shivering and terrified like the deer that awaits the final blow of the hunter's knife, killing him slowly with the tears that seeped between her quivering fingers, water that turned to acid when its presence registered across his pupils.

"Oh Seifer…oh Hyne…no, please…Dagan!"

He didn't know whether he heard the soft click, or if that faint, indescribable sixth sense of danger which had saved him before buzzed unnoticed in his head, but somehow, he turned in time--and threw himself to the side a split second before an explosion roared through the room. _Fucking moron--he's shooting too close to her! _He'd have never taken the shot if Quistis had been standing where his mother was now--it was too risky this close, too much of a chance he might hit her instead.

Seifer rolled to his feet with Hyperion flashing killing light into his father's eyes from his right hand. He stabbed forward--and hooked the gun from Dagan's hands into a spinning silver pinwheel of motion. He heard glass shatter.

Seifer lunged again. Dagan hurled the desk chair at him, and Hyperion snatched it neatly from the air, slicing it like flimsy paper.

His mother screamed again, on and on like an approaching siren that is stuck in some odd time warp, never quite reaching Seifer but never fading away either. "Seifer! Dagan, no! No! _No_!"

Dagan stumbled through broken wood toward the open door, flinging his wife aside, careening her off a wall corner and into the stair banister with a painful-sounding thud. He reached the stairs only a few steps ahead of his son, leaping four and staggering on the fifth, rolling his ankle, the leg folding under him as he pitched forward down the carpeted flight. He gained his feet again after a few steps, limping slightly now, and Seifer threw Hyperion--not like a spear, but with the spin of a deadly Frisbee, the flat of the blade striking at the ankles and taking his father down in an uncoordinated heap, his body slithering the final few steps into a broken mound at the foot of the staircase.

Hyperion gyrated to a slow halt.

Seifer retrieved his weapon by the handle as he passed it, taking each step one at a time now as the soundtrack of his mother's weeping played repulsively loud in his ears. It was sonic boom loud, end-of-the-world loud, noisier than a million battlefield explosions all detonating at once. He could hear his name mixed in between wrenching sobs, and his hands shook as he recalled that her voice had sounded like that the last time he'd heard it too, when she'd taken him to Matron's orphanage because they didn't want him anymore.

"Seifer! Seifer, don't! _Please_! Seifer!" she screamed.

He squeezed his eyes down to just a slit of color, siphoning out everything but the feeble twitching of his father, and the deep black of his lashes.

_"Rape her until she screams. Then keep going until he screams." _

His breath was a curious thing--arctic cold where it touched his lips, roiling thunder in his ears. Inhale, exhale. Blink.

He took another step down.

Inhale, exhale. Blink.

"_Seifer no no no no no no! Please don't do this! I still love you--Seifer don't do this to us! Seifer please!" _

Her words filled his ears, stuffed them to over-flowing, wrapping his heart in deadly little fingers of ice.

_"Don't listen to her, Seifer. She's lying to you. No one loves you, except me, little Knight. _No one_. That bitch just abandoned you--I offered you everything. Finish her after you kill him." _

Inhale, exhale. Blink.

He stepped down again, but the advance was a shaky one, and around Hyperion's handle his knuckles tightened until they popped, two perfect rows of marble white mounds that shook with the earthquake tremors of the very ill or frightened.

Or very weak.

_Get out of my head, bitch. You can't fucking control me. I'm not weak. Not anymore. I didn't come here for her._

"Seifer, please!"

Dagan rolled to his back. His eyes were still impenetrable, unbreakable--like his son's, and they stared at one another for a long time while something high and keening and terrible ripped through Seifer's body. It was his own scream, the one he didn't add to his mother's shrill cries for help, the one he kept trapped inside him like posion as it clawed his insides to shreds.

He could picture the point of his blade through this man's throat so easily--he could skewer him like so much useless meat and feel nothing, but his mother…

His mother couldn't watch this.

"Mom." Seifer choked out, and his voice surprised himself. Low, strangled, it belonged to someone else, someone who has never killed before while a loved one looks on and screams for mercy. "Look away."

Dagan opened his lips in a grim smile around teeth painted crimson with his own blood.

"Seifer no! Seifer, _please_! He's your father! _I love you_!"

_-Her face shone very brightly when he looked up at her with frightened eyes, with the same slick gleam it had worn during Jacob's funeral. "Mommy loves you, Seifer. She's going to let these nice people take care of you for a little while, ok? I'll see you soon. I love you, Seifer! Please don't, please-_

She'd never finished her fucking sentence.

_"Because she never loved you, Seifer. Do you believe me now?" _

He lifted Hyperion. It weighted his arm down like a thousand pounds, like a fully-loaded cargo ship set into his sweaty palm.

"Seifer, please, please, please, _don't do this_!"

_"Do it, Knight." _

_"Rape her until she screams. Then keep going until he screams." _

_-"And the little prince grabbed a fistful of stars out of the sky, tucking each precious little light into his pocket, before the evil sorcerer could steal them all…"_

_"Tell another one, mom."_

_"No, honey, time to go to bed now."-_

Dagan uncoiled like a striking snake.

He smashed his forearm into Seifer's shins, collapsing his son over the top of him. Seifer lost his grip on the gun blade and turned his fall into a roll, coming up on his feet in fighting stance, already moving for his lost weapon. But Dagan was closer, and not nearly as beaten as he'd allowed Seifer to believe earlier.

The scream had changed now, rising in pitch again. _"Dagan, don't! _Hyne, please _don't_! He's our son! _He's my son, Dagan!_"

Something rammed Dagan from behind, and, like magic, slender arms clenched around his middle, restraints that were too late to stop him. The impact of his mother against Dagan's back shoved his father forward, and Seifer stumbled backward with six inches of steel through his belly.

Quistis sat down hard in a rain-soaked gutter with Seifer's new coat pooling around her smelling of leather and him, and thought seriously about crying.

It seemed detrimental to her reputation however, even if there was no one around to see, and she doubted it would really help the situation much, and so--huddled deep inside folds of black leather, face buried in the collar his cheek had lain against just a few hours before--she decided against it.

She was lost. Hopelessly, perhaps fatally so--because she knew exactly where Seifer must have disappeared to, and she doubted very much that he and his father were discussing favorite scowling techniques. _If he had just _waited_…_

But Seifer never waited, not for anyone.

A rat scurried past her foot, squeaking its protest at her invasion onto its property. Quistis curved her palms over her knees for a moment and squeezed hard, drawing strength from the solidity of her body even as her hands shook like a frail old woman's, and heaved herself back to both feet.

She felt like an out-of-shape runner quitting a marathon, exhausted and burning with the need to keep pushing onward even as the body begins shutting itself down. Her knees turned liquid, gone weak with all the scenarios she couldn't stop from pushing their way into her head--

_--Seifer, leaking crimson from between those beautiful eyes--_

_--Seifer, laid out like a fallen angel beneath his father with the steel vise of those hands around his throat--_

_--Seifer, with the madness of the war burning like fever in his eyes again--_

She emerged from the alleyway between two run-down buildings looking carefully around her, one hand glued to the handle of her whip beneath the long coat. It was by no means a stellar area of town, and while she could more than handle herself, there was still only one of her--and a surprise attack by five burly men looking to mug her or worse would not exactly improve her night.

Niighttime collected in the solid black puddle that was the sky overhead, only the faintest cotton wisp of moon poking spindly fingers through that oil slick of darkness. Quistis walked rapidly, with purpose, focusing on everything at once, boot heels clicking noisily beneath her. She heard them echo through empty streets, and thought vaguely that this was not right--Deling City was bustling, crowded, filled with--

_--The jingle of costumes and children's laughter, and his undeniable presence, larger than the whole parade itself with his fire-painted hair and gilded scar and power-mad eyes--_

No. That was the past, and not the man Seifer was anymore.

She walked faster, looking straight ahead and seeing--

_--Whirling dancers, the crimson razor-slash of her mouth, black and violet and silver and red--_

Slightly ahead of her and to the left, a neon red sign with one letter shorted out gave off intermittent, sunset-bright flashes of light; Quistis veered toward it, grateful to get off the street even if an establishment like this was probably hardly any better.

She was right; opening the door introduced her to a whole new scent, some Hyne-awful combination of smoke and unwashed bodies and something she didn't really want to think about that might have knocked her off her feet if she weren't used to Zell, whose room tended to smell…interesting most of the time, particularly when he forgot random food items under his bed. A couple of eyes flicked toward her, their owners all well past 'inebriated' and moving with freight-train speed toward the kind of drunk that kills the liver.

The bartender was a bearded young man, his hair so dark it shone like oil under the dim lights, and had missed out on more than a few nights of sleep judging from the circles under his eyes. From the gun displayed very prominently on one of the shelves behind him, Quistis guessed he trusted his customers about as much as she did.

"What do you want?" he asked, rubbing his temples.

"Directions to the 4th District, please. I'm a little…lost."

"Uh, yeah, lady. You're a lot lost. You really shouldn't be here, actually."

"I'm very aware of that. Public transportation has already stopped for the night--I really need to reach the 4th District, so if you could please give me directions…"

He shook his head, slipping a napkin from behind the bar onto the countertop. "You couldn't catch public transportation over here, anyway. The buses stopped running over here a couple of years ago because the drivers and passengers kept getting robbed--one even got hijacked one time. Some crazy freak tried to crash it into the Presidential Palace, can you believe that?"

She watched him sketch out a rough map onto the napkin, pen scratching loudly in the bar's thick silence, the air torpid around her like warm honey. She began to sweat beneath the coat.

"So what are you doing all the way over here?" he asked her, glancing up from his work.

"Just very lost." Quistis replied quietly, not offering anymore information. She didn't know how well 'I'm actually looking for my friend Seifer Almasy, you might remember him, he's supposed to be dead, but actually he's running around the city alive probably trying to kill his father' would go over. Not well, she assumed. Although come to think of it, this kind of crowd didn't exactly appear…law-abiding, so perhaps they worshipped the ex-knight or something.

The bartender handed her the crude map, capping his pen. "There you go. Be careful out there--I got mugged just the other night walking home."

"Thank you." She tried out a smile on him, but it was a fake, pasted-on thing, and fell flat midway through. Somehow, picturing Seifer rushing off to his death leeched any ability to glue something false and twisted across her lips--they settled instead into the frozen rictus of a grimace, sharp and painful like knives to the eyes of anyone watching.

Quistis exited without another word, the coat flapping like raven's wings around her--she concentrated on the buttery glide of leather over her arms, on the coarse scratch of the napkin against her palm, on the monotonous rhythm of her tapping boot heels. It was the only thing that held at bay intrusive and far less wanted thoughts.

It was a good ten minutes before her surroundings started improving, buildings with their spray-painted art and carelessly-discarded trash gradually blending into simple, neat structures with more well-maintained sidewalks.

It took another five minutes for Quistis to notice something wasn't quite right with the shadows pooled in great ink splotches between streetlights.

She tucked the map into one pocket and unfurled her whip, not in the mood to take any chances.

Silhouettes formed an eerie, liquid-ripple of motion in front of her, serpent-sinuous and lightning fast. She saw nothing and yet everything inside them, like a leech filled to bursting with blood, like a child with belly distended with too much food. The shadows stretched--and snapped, an opening ripping itself into their center and spreading like some great yawning cavern.

Quistis lurched backward, stumbling a little as she dropped into combat stance. Her brain suddenly felt too large for her skull, as though the entire thing were trying to escape through the cavities of her eye sockets and ear canals. The hole rippled, and collapsed in on itself as the world around Quistis slanted into a strange, slow-motion tumble.

_"Quistis?" _

It was only a whisper in her head, but the kind that dragged like nails on a chalkboard.

She dropped her whip and cried out in pain, both hands clutching her temples as she sagged forward onto her knees.

_"Quistis? Can you hear me?" _

A thin ribbon of blood trailed from one nostril; she put a hand reluctantly on the ground to steady herself, fear and confusion beating inside her chest like a panicked bird. "Ri--Rinoa?"

Seifer had only known he was dead once before--standing on peach-stained grasses staring into the lavender cotton puffs of clouds while somewhere behind him a man counted out the final seconds of his life.

He felt cold steel kiss his flesh, felt it slip through skin and scrape along bone--superficially grazing ribs and not stabbing him through the gut, as he'd first imagined. It took him a moment to register the fact that he was still alive, and holding Hyperion by the blade now while his father finally looked at him with fear burning through the core of ice that was his derisive stare.

He didn't feel steel through the meat of his palm, or the sharp ache humming along his right side--just the horror of his mother's voice, wrapping him like cold, cold acid and tying itself in a sharp noose around his throat.

Seifer pulled Hyperion from his father's surprised hands, painting a wide streak of crimson down the blade where it slid farther along his hand. He took it by the handle again, and a heard a voice that couldn't have been his own ordering his mother to move away from Dagan.

It was the kind of voice that reminded him of the sorceress, full of contradictions: sharp but flat, full of burning passion and yet somehow emotionless. It stripped his throat raw, and when he spoke it rolled gravel across his vocal cords.

"Seifer, no…"

"Move away from him." He swung Hyperion back, over his shoulder, and his eyes didn't belong to the sorceress anymore--they were emerald ice, jade bottle glass with nothing inside them, no more burning, no more power. Just absence, because it was the only way he could block out his mother's weeping.

"Please, Rebecca." Dagan said softly.

The arms unpeeled reluctantly from around his waist, and the gun blade shifted higher.

It was a good throw, and too quick for Seifer to re-direct the direction of his swing.

It was a slow-motion cinema that he watched before him, and yet somehow he couldn't stop his arm, no matter how sluggishly it inched into killing position, no matter how reluctantly it swam through the crystallized honey of the air around him. His mother's slender forearm, caught in Dagan's powerful hand, came into view first, followed by her hurtling body as her ex-husband dropped and swung her over his shoulder, straight onto Hyperion's upraised blade.

She impacted with a horrible squelch, like a butcher's cleaver through raw animal meat.

Seifer heard Hyperion squeal along the bone of her spine, felt the vibration of the hit jarring his own bones, a deep throbbing that carved straight through the chest and into his heart.

He let go of the handle and stumbled backward, falling as all the strength left his legs in one great rush, like water spilled from a ruptured container.

"You took my son away from me, too, you son of a bitch." Dagan said coldly, stepping around the feebly twitching woman down onto the carpeted floor. "You didn't think I would be smart enough to know you'd come after me? I brought your mother here every night--I didn't want a fucking reconciliation like I told her, I thought you might at least care enough about her to come to some agreement. You were willing to do anything for Quistis Trepe."

He drew back his foot, and kicked Seifer hard in his injured side.

The ex-knight curled into fetal position, eyes wide and staring. He was a drowning man, his father speaking to him from above water; muffled and unimportant, distorted like the vision before him, the woman lying on her side wearing his mother's face, gasping like a beached fish and wearing Hyperion through her back like a bloody skewer.

It was just a vision, because that couldn't really be the woman who'd soothed his brow with her cool fingertips when it burned fever-hot, and it couldn't be the woman who'd held his hand tightly at Jacob's funeral even when a part of her must have hated him--

He felt another solid blow hammer his ribs, but that too was distant, inconsequential.

Somewhere, someone was asking him if he understood.

No, no he didn't. He didn't understand anything--not that red, red oil slick spreading beneath the body of the woman who couldn't be his mother, not the dull drumbeat of his heart, not the far-away sunburst sensation of pain in his side, flaring out into blinding white fireworks before his eyes.

_"Seifer! Seifer!" _

The voice was too masculine to be Ulticimea's, but just as horrible.

Inhale, exhale. Blink.

Library

Balamb Garden

Burrowed beneath a pile of books on top of a library book return cart was probably not his most brilliant choice of hiding places, in retrospect.

For one, the cart itself was not at all comfortable, to put it mildly. Cold steel shoved Zell's spine into his stomach, various protrusions here and there dimpling his limbs where they lay contorted into awkward positions to keep him from hanging off the cart. Several book ends seemed to be attempting violation of his body, and dust had begun to crawl a slow and excruciating path up his nose.

He shifted, toppling a hardback off the stack.

"Shh! Hold still, Dincht!" Irvine hissed from somewhere nearby. "Don't you remember how long it took us to get everything arranged so nicely?"

"But something's poking my ass!" Zell whispered.

Irvine guffawed.

"Hey, shut up man! You have a dirty mind."

"Shh, Irvy!"

Zell shifted again, and heard something land with a muffled thump on carpet. "What's going on? Is she here? Irvine, what's happening?"

"Stop moving!"

"Be quiet, Irvy! The door's opening."

"Irvine. Irvine! Is she here? Tell me what's going on, man, I can't see!"

"Shut up!"

The squeak of metal on metal tunneled through the cracks of his sanctuary, the sound of the library's door opening followed a moment later by Selphie's frantic "Irvy, _now_!"

"Hey, wha--"

The cart lurched violently, and shot into motion. He was a torpedo fired straight at her, books peeling apart around him like a flower opening its petals to the sun and sluicing down off either side of the cart while he held on for dear life and screamed. Zell would later claim it to be a fierce war cry, an assertion challenged by both Irvine and Selphie, who were of the opinion that it had sounded more like a little girl's shriek.

War cry or little girl wail, whatever it might be, it certainly held Bria's attention as she slipped inside. Still holding the door open, she snapped her head up in search of the scream's source, pink lips bowing into that 'o' of absolute astonishment that is an amusing expression--if it isn't aimed at you. He caught one fleeting glimpse of that pretty, startled face as he zoomed past her, out the door and into the hall beyond where he struck a group of students and sent himself, the cart, a few stubbornly clinging books and several innocent bystanders flying in all directions.

Zell spent a few moments blinking in confusion while Irvine's laughter rang on and on in his ears. His world appeared to be upside-down, the overturned cart sitting on the ceiling and the bare-legged cream of smooth skin that could only belong to a woman trailing up and up, to Bria's quirked eyebrows and pursed lips, all balanced quite neatly on the ceiling.

It took him a few disoriented moments to realize that it was _him _that was upside down, with his legs sticking ridiculously into the air and his body half-folded back onto his neck like some man-sized accordion.

Bria crossed her arms over her chest and kneeled down next to him. "Zell, what the hell are you doing?"

"Uh,"

He could see Irvine now, clutching his stomach as he walked himself to the doorway using chairs and tables to support his convulsing body, and he could see young men and women all around him staggering back to their feet, aiming looks at him that said he should probably check under his blankets before settling in for the night over the next couple of days.

"Uh, look, Bria…I'm sorry about everything that's happened. I'm a huge, incredible klutz, I didn't mean to do any of that stuff, and I just wanted…another chance. Please? I mean, you've lived through so much already--" He grinned, wide and--hopefully-- charming, though the effect may have been somewhat spoiled by the awkward position of his head.

"You want me to go out with you again?"

"Yeah!" _Ooops, that came out kind of loud…_he thought, using a martial arts kip to get back to his feet.

"The song!" Irvine gasped, pulling his hat down low over his face to conceal the tears of mirth streaming from his eyes. "Sing her the song!"

Zell fumbled for something in his pocket and produced a crumpled sheet of paper that he hastily tried to smooth out over his knee. Then, with a curious crowd and a nearly prostrate Irvine looking on, he righted the cart and stepped up onto it, letting out a little yelp as it jerked forward a few inches before settling into place once more. "Bria, I dedicate this song to you!"

"Bria Jayce had a pretty face, ee I ee I o! And on her face she had some lips, ee I ee I o! With a--" And here he broke off to make several moist, lengthy kissing sounds, puckering his lips into such an exaggerated pout that Irvine actually fell to one knee. "And a--" More noises, as the subject of his masterpiece flushed vibrant, gemstone crimson and attempted to hide her face. "She made me want to kiss her, ee I ee I o! Bria Jayce had a pretty face, ee I ee I o! And on this face she had some eyes, ee I ee I o! With a--"

"Stop!" she yelled, thrusting up both hands, waving them like an air traffic controller desperately trying to re-direct the plane that is mere feet away from tragic mistake. "_Stop_ Zell, right now!"

"Is that a yes?" he asked, clutching his paper nervously in front of him, the sweat lines that hemorrhaged into puddles of liquid blurring letters from existence off the page's chicken-scratched margins. He really wished Irvine would stop laughing--and come to think of it, hadn't a couple more people joined in by now?

"Hey!" he yelled, his temper flaring. "Knock it off! I stayed up all night writing this!"

"Ah come on, Bria--let him keep goin'--it gets even better." Irvine called between giggles.

"Zell." she said, turning the intense laser focus of her eyes onto him, the strawberry glow of her hair collecting in soft waves around the luminescent rose of her cheekbones, her beauty a slap in his already flustered face, until he could only stand there with that dreaded paper drooping in front of him and hang his mouth open like some drooling idiot. "Will the singing stop, if I agree to give you another chance?"

"Yeah, sure, if you want it to."

"Will the singing, never _ever _happen again if I give you another chance?"

Zell released the paper with one hand and scratched his head. "Well, I had a couple more songs written, and they were pretty good if I do say so myself, but I guess--"

"_Never ever_, Zell, please. Promise me."

He nodded. "Ok."

Irvine wiped dampness from his face and climbed back to his feet with the assistance of Selphie, the smile on his handsome face not entirely one of amusement anymore. He slung an arm around Selphie's shoulders and pulled his girlfriend against his side.

Zell glanced over at his friend as that moment stretched into eternity, and the look that passed between them was pure warmth--brotherly camaraderie and the deep, selfless love that is present between two good friends, unmotivated and unending and simply existant.

He was already smiling when she finally gave her answer.

"Fine then. Yes, Zell, I will give you another chance."

"Rinoa?" Quistis whispered, Seifer's coat fanning out around her, the pavement beneath the knees of her pants hard and gritty and cold.

_"Quistis! Quistis, you can hear me?" _

"Yes. How--"

_"I don't know Quisty--I got free for a second and just reached out…she's trying to take me back, Quistis, you have to help me!" _

Despair formed a second heartbeat in Quistis' chest as Rinoa's hopelessness bled through into her chest, into her bloodstream itself, filling her veins with the kind of corrosive substance that strips bare everything it touches. "All right, calm down. What can I do?"

_"They're coming for me, now, Quisty. Ultimicea is so strong…she's so powerful, Quisty--she can't get free, Quistis please--" _

The voice was blurred, collapsing in on itself and then rippling back outward, overlapping, like one radio station intermittently cutting in on another. It was Rinoa's voice one moment, then the next it was not, and she thought, behind Rinoa's desperate pleas, that she could hear someone else as well.

_"Quisty please…stop it, you little bitch, no one's going to reach you in time…Quisty I need help now, they're going to…they're going to release me and you can't stop them, Rinoa Heartilly…Quisty it's an emergency, I need you--"_

Panic splashed bile into Quistis' throat, but the soldier in her swallowed it back down. "I can't reach you in time to stop anything, Rinoa--I'm in Deling City at the moment. But I can get ahold of Squall for you--he'll be able to help faster than I can."

_"No, Quistis, it's…my Knight…They'll kill him if they catch him, Quistis, you have to…--grating laughter--…You're not safe either, Quistis, she wants--"_

And just like that, Rinoa and Ultimicea disappeared, like someone had simply flipped a switch in Quistis' brain. She felt only a faded ache trapped inside her head where their presence had savaged her mind, and the single streamer of blood from one nostril, dried now into a flaking crust across her upper lip.

_"…my Knight…They'll kill him if they catch him, Quistis, you have to--"_

"Seifer." she whispered out loud, her stomach jerking into life, coiling itself around the leaden stone that was her fear, palpable and so very very heavy.

She needed a phone, immediately.

Her legs didn't work quite right anymore; she scrambled to her feet, and they simply folded under her, puppet limbs with the strings cut. Her hands formed claws of desperation, frantic little blurs of motion that bent the nails and tore the flesh as she grappled for purchase in this world that had suddenly come unglued around her.

It took another painful few moments for Quistis to finally get her feet under her, and she ran to the nearest house, her gait a staggering sort of fall that carried her all the way to a door before she collapsed against it, banging her fist on it with the kind of thundering authority that shakes the whole building.

"Please! I need a phone, right away, it's an emergency." she blurted as soon as the door swung open on the face of an older man, haggard with the final traces of sleep, surrounded by disheveled tufts of graying hair.

He must have believed the urgency in her tone, or else something in her eyes told him that if he didn't cooperate, she'd push her way past him into the house and use it anyway, even if it meant going straight through him. At any rate, he held the door open wider to invite her inside, and Quistis sprinted gratefully past, choking on the acidic ocean of terror and shock that filled her mouth.

* * *

Deck

Balamb Garden

Balamb Garden was stationed only twenty miles from Esthar when Quistis' call woke Squall from a light, troubled catnap. He set course immediately for the Sorceress Memorial, and spent the longest half hour of his life standing at the railing of the massive flying academy, hair ruffled by night's chilling fingers, his entire body frozen into the coldest slab of ice.

The sky spread like satin above him, bejeweled with little diamond lights of stars, artfully arranged like a jeweler's finest display. He felt those pinpricks of illumination burning behind his eyes, pulsing on and off in strobe-light flashes of light that splashed her image across the backs of his eyelids. He could see only her in that great ebony expanse above him, raven sleek like her hair, beautiful and amazing and too big to fill his heart, spilling over the sides into his chest.

He could feel the cold steel burn of the railing penetrating his gloves, and he could feel the weight of the blanket Selphie had thrown over his shoulders.

But inside, there was only her, and awful, debilitating fear.

"Can't this thing go any faster?" Squall barked at Nida, who was sitting nearby looking wide awake and alert despite having been dragged out of bed only a couple of minutes earlier.

"Sorry, Commander--this is top speed. Don't worry, we should be there in about twenty-five minutes." He smiled reassuringly, like he couldn't even imagine just how much could happen in twenty-five too-short minutes.

Squall looked back out over the rail, kneading it between his palms, blankly watching the rush of ground far below and the circular spinning radiance orbiting Garden's exterior. He'd already alerted Laguna--there was really nothing else he could do now, except wait.

He despised helplessness. He supposed he and Seifer probably had that in common--perhaps that was why the ex-knight always took things into his own hands, because he couldn't stand waiting around, depending on other people to take care of things. If he was too busy rushing headlong into the situation, he didn't have any time to worry.

Esthar Sorceress Memorial

Esthar

Seifer couldn't remember arriving, or the journey itself. He came back to himself when his foot touched solid ground, and he found himself exiting the giant metal exoskeleton of an airship--military, obviously, courtesy of Galbadia and his father.

He thought it must be raining; the building that towered before them appeared wet, glistening under the black paint layer that was the nighttime sky, but his numb skin could detect no temperature change, and he was ashamed to admit that the moisture on his cheeks might not be rainwater.

Dagan stepped into his line of sight, carrying something limp and bloody.

Inhale, exhale. Blink.

Sometime during the trip he must have forgotten how to breathe, because he gagged on the oxygen that entered his lungs, felt it crawl down his throat like poisoned talons, ripping the tender meat of his airway inch by excruciating inch.

It was that stranger again, wearing his mother's face and sagging from his father's arms, the gaping fissure that was her stomach still sporadically weeping blood. Her green, green eyes, jade like bright spring meadows, winked open and closed at him, fighting for control over the the hovering death shroud of unconciousness.

She was still fucking alive. She was still fucking alive, and he was still holding a blood-spattered Hyperion in one shaking hand, escorted on either side by armed soldiers.

"Take Rinoa from the Memorial, and she can have medical care." Dagan ordered.

Seifer's hand tightened around his gun blade. He was always someone's fucking toy to play with.

He walked forward, into the darkness, into the rain, into the Sorceress Memorial.

Squall could just begin to make out the jagged spire of the Memorial poking through midnight sky, and it took every ounce of control he possessed to not just hurl himself over the side of the railing and sprint the rest of the way. It would probably be faster--if the fall didn't kill him, which it most certainly would.

"Nida." He said tightly.

Garden's unofficial captain already knew what his commander wanted. "We're going as fast as we can, sir. Hang on. Not too much longer."

But it wasn't 'not too much longer--' it was forever, and he could barely stand it. Time coalesced like thickly-spun spider webs around him, solid and tacky and confining, boxing him off into one small square of railing and blanket and blowing wind until he could hardly breathe.

He heard the elevator hum to life behind him, but didn't turn. A moment later the sound of Irvine's noisy boots clattering their way toward him rang out, followed a second later by the sharpshooter's soft drawl.

"Squall, did you get in touch with Laguna?"

"I couldn't reach him personally. I left a message--I've left a couple, actually."

"Look toward Esthar."

He'd been so focused on the Memorial itself that he'd never even glanced farther over to the city--he did so now, and straightened slightly. The entire metropolis lay in utter blackness, eerily still and dark, a dead city. "What's going on?"

"Dunno, boss. Something bad, though. And I don't think we'll be getting any help with Rinoa."

To their left, Nida suddenly shot up out of his seat. "Look!"

A bright stream of light exploded out of the top of the Memorial, fountaining out to either side like a spray of diamonds, and then exploding in one brilliant fireworks display of illumination that shot forked lightning out over the entire layout of Esthar. Squall's ears rang with a terrific crack, and beside him Irvine blurted out "Holy shit!"

_Rinoa!_

Inside, the light hurt his eyes. It swelled around him in a colossal globe, bouncing off either wall and skittering fragments of illumination down the hallway. Light flamed like sparks around his boots, and deeper inside the structure he heard yelling.

Hyperion lay over his right shoulder, capturing the dazzling glow and turning it a million times brighter. His footsteps echoed metallically, and it was that noise Seifer concentrated on as he approached the main room and the empty control desk.

As he walked, a man staggered from a connecting hall up to the desk, his movements frantic, panicked. "Everything's going crazy! I can't do anything!" he yelled, banging one hand futilely down on a wildly blinking computer monitor.

He half-turned toward Seifer and managed "Hey, what--" before the ex-knight slammed the handle of his gun blade into the man's skull, slumping him unconscious over the desk. The fall of his body was an insignificant noise, lost under the crackling of light and clamorous beeping of several machines gone haywire all at once.

"Rob, don't--"

Seifer heard a cry, a loud crash, and then silence from the building's other inhabitants.

He rounded the corner, and the light ballooned around him again, filling all gaps until the entire room was only white, endless white with that tinge of superheated red-gold that is a thin line just behind the eyes. In front of him, just barely visible through the blinding illumination, he could see Rinoa standing in her glass capsule, eyes closed and arms folded neatly, elegantly over her chest.

The capsule's mechanism was the only silent thing in the room, while everything else deteriorated around it.

Seifer took a step toward it, and stopped.

"_Take Rinoa from the Memorial, and she can have medical care." _

_"Dagan, don't! _Hyne, please _don't_! He's our son! _He's my son, Dagan!_"

Rinoa's hair hung straight and perfect over her delicate shoulders, two polished marble waterfalls, soft like her skin but far darker.

It was Rinoa Heartilly in that glass prison, but he could see hints of Ultimicea buried somewhere inside her, like veins close to the surface of the skin.

The pale eyelids flickered, and the whiteness embracing him like downy angel wings shrank--her eyes leeched the brightness right from the room, twin embers of smoldering black that banished any notion that this creature was Rinoa Heartilly. There was no white of the eye anymore, just pure obsidian glass.

The lips stretched horribly, but it was not Rinoa's smile.

Her voice echoed strangely behind the glass. _"Hello Seifer. I've missed you." _

The hand holding Hyperion twitched, almost as though some ancient, hidden part of himself still responded to that hideous voice. "Sorry I can't say the same, bitch."

_"You're here to release me." _It wasn't a question.

He tasted bile sitting on the tip of his tongue, and maybe even blood. Acid and copper swished together in a nauseating amalgamation of flavors. His fingers locked around steel, and he could feel his knees trembling.

_"Release me, Seifer. We have another chance. Please." _The voice was soothing, plaintive, and sounded vaguely like his mother's now--the old one, who'd read him stories before bed and played ball with him, not that dying shell of a woman outside.

_"Please, Seifer. We were taken from one another too soon, weren't we? Help me fix that. Help me give us back that time we lost." _

He closed his eyes, and took a step forward.

"Land now!" Squall screamed as another pyrotechnics exhibit exploded above the Memorial, shooting light in all directions like falling stars. "Take Garden down now, Nida!"

The blanket fluttered from his shoulders as he spun and flung himself toward the elevator, snatched by the wind and whisked over the side of the building. Irvine crammed onto the small platform with him, and they rode it down in tense silence.

Two floors later, they emerged onto the main level where Squall hurled himself into the crowd, shoving milling students out of his way as he sprinted for the exit. He skidded across polished tiles as Garden dove, solid floor slanting out beneath them as Nida brought the floating monstrosity into a steep plummet. His legs kicked out from beneath him and he sat down hard, bruising his tailbone, Lionheart clanking against the floor with a loud squeal.

Clenching his teeth, Squall groped for the staircase railing he'd slid back toward and held on grimly while around him people cried out in alarm, and Irvine's hat abandoned its owner to spin crazily back and forth under stampeding feet.

An eternity passed before he felt a hard jolt and the final few short bumps followed by a long skid that indicated they'd finally touched land. He scrambled immediately to his feet and tore toward the exit, vaulting pieces of construction still ongoing here and there where Ultimicea had made her first disastrous appearance.

"Squall!"

He kept running.

The ground felt odd beneath his feet--he hadn't touched real ground in weeks, and the sensation of spongy mud under his scrambling boots nearly undid him. He slogged through it though, and faster than any human being should have been able to without falling, because just a few hundred yards ahead of him lay the Memorial--it was the longest, most arduous journey of his life, each pounding footfall mocking the desperate flutter of his heartbeat. He didn't know how many times he screamed for her--but by the time he reached the building's entrance, his throat felt bruised and raw, and her name was just a hoarse croak now.

He heard someone shouting his name again, but he never even slowed.

Inside, the light hurt his eyes.

_"Let me go, Seifer." _

He held onto the image of that stranger wearing his mother's face, onto the sight of blood-stained cloth wadded into the ragged edges of her wound as he took another step forward. The light stabbed his pupils again, and he could feel his hand aching distantly where he gripped his weapon by the blade.

It was an ache that kept him sane. He held onto that pain for dear life.

_"Yes, my Knight. That's it. I'm sorry you've been hurt, Seifer. You've been mistreated, disrespected--it isn't right." _

"Shut up." he snarled, his teeth locked in a fierce wolf's sneer. "Don't pretend to give a shit about me. I'm not doing this for you."

_"If I don't give a shit about you, Seifer Almasy, who will? No one loves you--not even you, but I--I took you into my care, do you remember? I gave you everything, Seifer. Everyone else just takes from you." _

"I said _shut the fuck up_!"

He could feel her everywhere inside him, like she'd dipped her hands into his solar plexus and ripped him apart at the sternum, laying naked every vulnerable little corner of him to be scoured by that awful, searing light. His entire body screamed with the pain of it, with the agony of resisting her will. Her fingers caressed his mind again, searching for the cracks she'd let herself in through the first time. They were still there, he knew, poorly-healed, like a femoral artery duct-taped back together--still open, still gushing, still fatal.

The floor squeaked beneath the boot he placed carefully ahead of the other one, each quivering step a battle against the excruciation of her presence.

She sang inside his blood.

His eardrums burst, and red trickled down either side of his neck.

Seifer stopped. Hyperion slithered downward, until he grasped the handle once more. He gazed up into Rinoa's sweet, sweet face--and saw only stolen innocence.

He raised the gun blade, his arm trembling. He could feel every ounce of it weighing down on his hand, vibrating up through the trembling muscles of his bicep. It felt like a thousand pounds, all balanced in that one quivering palm while the light continued to sting his eyes and she put her slender little hands up against the glass, watching eagerly.

The face contorted suddenly while he looked up into the shimmering coal lumps of those eyes, and he could practically taste her horror on the back of his tongue now.

_"Seifer, no!!"_

This was pure Rinoa now, and the girlish innocence of that voice amidst so much evil brought Hyperion crashing down--not onto the mechanism that would free Ultimicea, but against the floor, where its tip gouged an ugly scratch into the tile.

_"Seifer, stop! Please, Seifer! You can't let her out!" _

"Rinoa--"

The endless glittering well of her gaze squeezed shut--and he leapt back, horrified, as Rinoa reared back and smashed her beautiful face into the glass, hammering her forehead over and over again into it like some mental patient gone crazy in the hospital's psych ward.

"Stop it!" he yelled, darting in front of the capsule. "Knock it the fuck off, Ultimicea! What the hell are you doing to her?"

_"Release me!" _Rinoa screamed, blood spraying from both nostrils, streaking across the glass as she impacted again.

"Stop it!" Seifer demanded, slamming an elbow into the smooth prison, as though that might somehow deter the sorceress. "Stop it, dammit, Ultimicea!"

_"Tick tock, Seifer; time's running out and your mother's dying!" _Rinoa shrieked, her smile a bloody grimace that she flashed his way for a few seconds before her head rocketed forward against the glass once more.

"_Stop it_!" he screamed, barely recognizing his own voice.

_"Tick tock, Seifer Almasy!" _Thud. Chilling laughter, the kind that dragged sharp nails down his spine.

_"Seifer, don't do it, please! Let her kill me! Let her kill me, Seifer!" _

Thud.

He hefted Hyperion again, his eyes sliding frantically between the mechanism and her bloody, ravaged face. The room blurred out of focus around him, until he saw only that flickering box, and her crimson-smeared features, distorted into the bestial contortion of one gone completely mad.

Thud.

The air in his lungs froze, quiescent like stagnant pond water sitting heavy inside the chest. Against his weapon, his hands stored the coldness that coiled in the pit of his stomach, an artic chill that not even Trabia's harshest winter could match.

Thud.

He spun in an ark of silver and red, coat and gun blade swirling out like skilled dancers, and that torpid breath erupted from him in one final, tortured scream.


	18. Chapter 17

**A/N: Wow...so this is a lot sooner than I expected to have my next chapter up, but I sat down at my computer today to write a little more and ended up working on this story for hours. This is the last chapter of part one of this story; part two will open a few months later. As always, thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!**

**Chapter Seventeen**

Sorceress Memorial

Esthar

The look on her face was a hammer blow to his chest, splintering ribs and collapsing the entire fractured mess around his thundering heart. He felt needle-thin jabs of pain everywhere, an embrace of anguish that completely consumed the fluttering organ and shot bile into his mouth with the force of a rocketship during takeoff.

"_Rinoa_!"

He thought he screamed her name, but the light and her blood and his own sick sense of desolation disoriented Squall--and with his attention focused on the molten gold shine of hair and the solar flare of Hyperion, his voice was nothing, unimportant.

The blinding whiteness formed a painful cocoon around Seifer, illumination imprisoned under the gun blade's surface like a million fireflies. The ex-knight's scream tore like claws at Squall's ears--he saw the beginning ark of Hyperion's final attack, saw the faded red of his coat burning with brand new blood-shine crimson, courtesy of the glow surrounding him.

He felt hollow inside, like a man who has lost everything and has no idea which way is up anymore. It was her horrible, blood-smeared face that did to him--it was the face of the woman he loved, and yet not, because she had never looked like that before, never stared at him through the rolling black marbles of eyes that held only madness. The fire that bubbled in his throat and burned his heart down to a charred ruin was knowledge--it was knowing that Squall had finally lost Rinoa Heartilly as he'd always feared he would. It was knowledge that he had lost her because he was somehow flawed--not fast enough, not smart enough, not good enough to save her.

But he could still save the rest of them.

Lionheart sang free of its sheath, a pure, clean note like an angel's opus. The light reflected off his weapon and burned his eyes, prying free a couple agonized tears.

He lunged.

The sorceress screamed as Lionheart re-directed Hyperion, the deadly tips of both weapons screeching superficially along the mechanism to skewer the wall beyond, leaving only a harmless scratch in their wake.

Seifer's head snapped around to confront Squall, and the gaze burned with grief and regret and a million other emotions he'd never known the traitor could experience; the sight froze Squall for one fatal moment, long enough for Seifer to yank his weapon clear of the wall.

_"Release me!_"

It was a banshee's scream, horrible and gut-wrenching.

He swung Lionheart again as Seifer spun--not toward him, as Squall would have suspected, but back toward the capsule holding the fragile, bleeding body of Rinoa Heartilly.

The traitor's gun blade flashed.

"No!" Squall yelled, and his voice rang with authority, loud enough to shatter the sorceress' own keening demand, loud enough to block out the eternal, static white noise of the illumination spearing through her prison.

He reached out as Hyperion arked back over a gray-draped shoulder--and snagged Seifer's wrist in a crushing grip, Lionheart drooping at his right side as the struggle turned into one of pure brute strength. He gritted his teeth, holding on for everything he was worth, clinging to that powerful hand with all the love that still flamed inside him with flash bang intensity for a woman who no longer existed.

Seifer let go.

Hyperion landed with a resonating clang, just missing stabbing Squall through the foot.

Inside the capsule, Rinoa's face spasmed, muscles twitching out of control.

Her mouth peeled apart in a scream that frayed his ear drums apart from the inside out, drilling through into the core of his brain, finding every weak spot and shoving fingers like red hot pokers inside to tear away the very essence of Squall Leonhart.

Both men cried out in pain. Seifer fell to one knee, and Squall lost his hold on Lionheart--the crash of its impact against the floor meant nothing to him, just like the slow crawl of Seifer's pale fingers toward the handle of his own dropped gun blade.

He heard a sound like cracking ice, and looked up through blurring eyes to see the glass spider-webbing into fracture lines like branching tributaries, the capsule starring randomly here and there.

Seifer's hand reached Hyperion and closed around it.

Squall kicked out with one leg and smashed his boot down onto the ex-knight's fingers, breaking one with a sharp crack that dragged a muffled cry from Seifer's lips.

Another section of glass splintered with a sharp report, loud like the final percussive grenade blast in a battlefield sonata.

He staggered to his feet.

The capsule holding Rinoa wasn't originally meant to sustain a human being--it stored biohazard dangers like viruses that they isolated inside the safety of a lab where they could identify them and concoct cures. It had been specially prepped for Rinoa during her first imprisonment, with an oxygen tank hooked into it so she could still breathe, and it was that he headed for now, retrieving Lionheart on his way, the steel burning cold through his glove like the ring of ice encircling his heart.

Another sudden crack stabbed his ears, and one entire side of the capsule trembled violently.

The stagger turned into a sprint.

He screamed as he lifted Lionheart in a two-handed grip, because that single moment in time hurt worse than anything else he'd ever experienced--he never would have believed a human being could feel so much pain and keep functioning. Every muscle fiber burst into flames, like a runner at the end of his stamina who must keep going, the breath that wheezed between his lips sharp like knives, corrosive like acid. His heart was nothing, just a few insignificant ashes now, stirred by the slender ribbons of oxygen that the closed pinhole of his throat allowed through.

His eyes stung as Lionheart soared higher. His tears seared his flesh right down to the bone, so hot they chilled the skin, froze it into a stiff grimace.

The light pulsed brighter, weaving itself through the roots of his lashes, embedding itself like a memory on the backs of his eyelids.

Lionheart fell like the whistling stroke of an executioner's axe, like the final crashing death blow of the guillotine.

The light radiating from Rinoa's body gave a final nuclear-bright flash, and the capsule exploded, the shockwave picking him up off his feet and hurling him across the room into the opposite wall. Squall lay stunned for several long moments, sucking air through his lungs like a beached fish and watching her step down onto broken glass, glittering like a fallen galaxy beneath her feet.

He tried to force his wide open eyes closed, because he didn't want to watch this, but somehow they refused to obey him.

She walked like he remembered--with that eerie, liquid, shuffling uncertainty of someone not quite sure how to move, like a healed spinal injury victim re-learning how to walk. It was not the sprightly bounce of Rinoa Heartilly--it was something else altogether, and he wanted to cry because she couldn't even fucking _walk _like herself anymore--

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Seifer climbing stiffly to his feet, brushing glass from the sleeves of his coat.

Rinoa smiled, and behind the blood and the lunacy there seemed to be a touch of the gentle young woman--though some distant part of Squall told him it was not Rinoa's softness shining through drying gore. It was the sorceress' affection, and she aimed it toward Seifer.

_"My beautiful little Knight." _

Squall slitted his eyes against the glare.

"I'm not your fucking knight, bitch." The reply was just a growl, hate-filled and without a trace of the loyalty he'd once shown this woman.

Hyperion appeared like magic in Seifer's right hand, the index finger bent at an odd angle and sticking strangely out from the grip. The blade sucked the star-fire glow of the room's illumination into it, slashing bars of blinding light across Squall's fluttering eyes.

Seifer hacked his gun blade at Rinoa's neck, and even though he was finishing what Squall himself had failed to do, he still shot up off the floor, yelling her name and holding his chest like an old man suffering a heart attack. Maybe he really was having a heart attack, because though he could have sworn the organ had been burned down to just a few pitiful flaking remains, it seemed to explode inside him now, clogging his airway with fragments of itself while he gasped for fresh oxygen.

Rinoa smacked the back of one dainty little hand into the flat of Hyperion's blade and ripped it right out of Seifer's hand, the weapon cart wheeling out of his fingers like a deadly Frisbee.

Squall scrambled painfully to his knees, still clutching his chest.

Her fingers pressed sharp like talons into the ex-knight's throat, and Squall watched his world slowly fade to black around him while the pain in his chest punched him low in the gut.

Her eyes sucked at him like twin portals into hell, darker than any night he'd ever seen, blacker than what his own soul must look like. The fingers that closed his throat into one minute, gasping tunnel through which air had to claw itself through burned with winter coldness. He felt that touch all the way down into his gut, all the way down to the very tips of his toes, flailing uselessly where they dangled a foot above the floor.

_"Where is your loyalty?!" _she screamed in his face, the pretty mouth that split his skull in half with its wail gaping like a lightless cavern.

Seifer pried frantically at her hand and realized that this was one of the few times in his life that he'd ever been truly fucking scared. It wasn't so much impending death that frightened him--no, he'd faced that plenty of times and never even blinked. It was her rape of his mind, the forceful entry of her into his most private thoughts and desires, the way she picked carelessly through the images of his memories and seemed to linger over the snapshot remembrances of Quistis he stored carefully inside. It was the way she squirmed low down inside him, chewing through his intestines like maggots, or rats.

His hazy peripheral vision caught a glimpse of Leonhart, behind him and slightly to the left, either dead or unconscious. Maybe that was good--dead or out of it, he didn't have to watch what had become of the woman he loved.

Seifer wished he'd shared Squall's fate. He didn't want to watch this either.

_"Did I mean nothing to you, Seifer Almasy? Are you really such a stupid, arrogant idiot that you never even cared about my sacrifices?" _

"What…fucking…sacrifices?" he spat. "You…fucking…used me."

She shook him like a naughty child, and each jerk of his body pushed his throat into the palm of her hand, until the red film of unconciousness began to color his world in brilliant, vibrant burgundy.

"_Where is Quistis Trepe? There is not enough left of Rinoa to tell me." _

_No--not her, dammit. Not Quistis, you fucking bitch…_

It was the hardest thing he'd ever done, to smile in the face of that evil, but he did it, peeling his lips off his teeth into a grim, satisfied expression that smoked her gaze even hotter. "If she's…not telling, than neither…am I."

_"Then I'll rip her out of your mind. You will be a drooling vegetable for the rest of your life, Seifer Almasy, not dead but never quite alive either." _she told him coldly. _"And I will do the same thing to Quistis--but much more slowly, so she suffers into old age and never knows the same oblivion that you will." _

"I'm not…betraying…her." he gagged out.

Rinoa laughed bitterly, spraying blood into his face, burning his skin. _"Does Quistis deserve the loyalty you're no longer giving me?" _

He closed his eyes, siphoning out her voice as best he could, concentrating on the pressure of her fingers around his throat, on the sway of his body hanging like dead meat from her grasp, on the amount of force he would need to pivot his neck the wrong way in her hand and break it. He forced any thought of Quistis from his mind even though she was the person he most wanted to think about in the last moments of his life--because if Ultimecia pried the information she needed from him, he would never forgive himself. Vegetable or not, that would haunt Seifer for the rest of his life.

The hand that Squall had stomped on hung motionless down one side of his body, the other wrapped around Rinoa's wrist in some vain attempt to pull her off him. He slipped his free hand now into a side pocket of his trench coat while she poured all the scalding menace of her gaze into his own tightly shut one, and he could feel her waiting there for him behind the thin membrane of skin that separated his eyes from hers.

The knife he held in his fingers trembled, twitching like his rattled nerves.

He moved fatally quick, like lightning.

He always had been almost unnaturally fast, a speed that only Squall had come close to besting.

The blade's glittering point sank into her throat, up to the hilt, and he twisted violently at the same moment, listening for the final crack of bone that would splinter his world into fragments of unseeing black. Her scream assaulted him, and the hand loosened just enough to viciously wrench his neck, but not break it.

He slithered from her fingers into a puddle on the floor at her feet.

She sprayed blood in a grisly waterspout of crimson as Squall stirred, and he scrambled on hands and knees toward his old enemy while she staggered toward them, flinging gore everywhere.

Squall was sitting up now, clutching himself around the middle like a man with his heart ripped out of his chest. It was a description probably not far off the mark, Seifer thought as he grabbed the other man roughly by the elbow. "Get the fuck up, Leonhart. _Now_."

"Rinoa--" he whispered brokenly, climbing awkwardly to his feet with Seifer yanking sharply on his arm.

"That's not Rinoa anymore." Seifer shoved him harshly. "Get the fuck out of here, Squall."

Blue-gray steel connected with emerald fire, the granite of the former fracturing around the edges and crumbling into plain cobalt, the layer of hardness chipped away for the first time ever.

Seifer pushed him again.

He heard retreating footsteps, clumsy at first, then more sure, and then there was only him and the huddled pain of what used to be Rinoa Heartilly, Lionheart between them like the dividing line of two countries at war.

Squall felt the rain on his face first and the wind second, forming an endless dome of screams around him as it plucked at his clothes and shoved him into the teeth of the storm. He stumbled and fell as he shuffled from the Sorceress Memorial like a walking dead man, coughing phlegm and blood from his aching lungs onto the damp sidewalk beneath him.

Something large and metal blurred in and out of focus several feet ahead of him; for a moment he thought hazily that it must be Garden, but a rapid shake of his head coalesced the image more clearly, and he realized that it was an airship wearing Galbadia's colors, something he'd completely ignored during his initial entrance into the memorial.

Standing in front of it, sunk ankle-deep into blood and mud, Irvine stood re-loading his rifle, three dead men and one unmoving woman scattered at his feet. Beside her boyfriend, Selphie pointed a finger toward him and screamed something, the cry bouncing uselessly around inside Squall's throbbing head.

Irvine's shout was louder, or at least more lucid to Garden's commander. "Squall! Squall, what the hell's goin' on?"

He dragged himself forward with bleeding fingers, hauling his lower body behind him like a paralyzed man tipped from his wheelchair--somehow his legs refused to function, the knees locked into a frozen rigor mortis that made standing, much less running, impossible.

Irvine and Selphie came running toward him, the tall cowboy handing his gun off to his girlfriend to help Squall to both feet.

His knees were liquid now, limp, buckling, useless.

"What happened?" Irvine asked again, deep lines of concern etched into his forehead.

"Destroy it." Squall wheezed, folding over again to clasp his chest, where his heart burned like a miniature sun. "Blow the building up. It's…it's the only way."

Irvine blanched, his face bleached bone-white beneath the wide brim of the hat he'd rescued somewhere along the way, a few strands of long brown hair blowing loose around his cheeks. "Are you sure, Squall?"

He hung his head, trying not to vomit. "Do it, Irvine."

The words destroyed him, but he uttered them anyway, wondering how long he had to wait before his legs would start working again while he stood there trying to hold himself together. He had one more thing left to do.

Irvine turned to Selphie as Squall pressed his fingers into his solar plexus, as though without that weight against the brittle bone of his chest he would simply fly apart, like a shattered glass figurine. He wasn't entirely convinced that he wouldn't, not with her screams still echoing in his head, and her blood splattered across his memories like photographs from a happier time saturated in gore at the scene of a murder.

"Selphie, how fast can you get Ragnarok ready?" Irvine asked quietly, his face stricken beneath the shadow of his hat, gripped in the wind's violent fingers and fluttering loudly until he secured it with a hand.

Squall didn't hear her response. He was concentrating on his legs, on the feeling beginning to seep its way back into them, on the strength that coiled alive once more inside muscle and bone.

He shook Irvine's supporting arm off him, still holding his chest.

"Squall? Squall, wait!"

Selphie very quietly said "Irvy, let him go," as he ran back the way he'd come, and somehow he caught that, the words echoing inside him as his heart gave another agonizing clench that nearly brought him to his knees.

But it didn't, and he sprinted back into the light, into the pain, into the echoing emptiness that was the Sorceress Memorial.

Seifer and Rinoa were both gone, only an abandoned Hyperion and artistic fans of red spray painted across the floor indicating that they'd ever existed.

He was sweating inside his damn coat.

What a fucking impression he'd made on his father with it--what a fucking impression he'd made on everyone in this shabby ghost that stank of all his failures, Seifer thought as he retreated, swinging the unfamiliar gun blade in his hand at sporadic intervals to keep the wild-eyed Rinoa at bay. Each booming drumbeat of his heart pounded in his ears, and the scent of perspiration and fear curled up inside his nostrils, where they slept like hibernating animals.

His breath scraped his lungs raw.

The swing of this weapon was all wrong--weighted and shaped slightly different than what he was used to, completely throwing him off. He felt like a first year idiot with no idea of what he was doing facing off against Garden's most accomplished fighter.

His knife still protruded from Rinoa's throat, trickles of gore fanning out around it in red streamers that stained the front of her shirt. She stumbled as she walked, but whether it was because Ultimecia was still getting the hang of controlling her body or because she was weakening, Seifer didn't know. He really fucking hoped the bitch was about to drop, but he knew better than to expect her to go down that easily.

She ripped at his mind as they moved, he edging carefully away and trying frantically to come up with some brilliant plan, she clawing up sections of his memory with no gentleness, shredding away at everything until she discovered what she wanted.

Well, she wasn't getting Quistis. Never. He was not a good man--he'd accepted a long time ago that he was not the hero of the story and never would be--but he knew loyalty, despite Ultimecia's tirades, and Quistis had earned his loyalty. Ultimicea could kill him, scar him, even take his mind--he didn't care, as long as she didn't get Quistis.

Seifer feinted with Lionheart, then reversed the attack and gouged a chunk of bloody meat from Rinoa's shoulder.

She didn't even seem to notice. That dazzling light sparked along her skin, tracing her pale skin like pulsing veins, throbbing behind his eyes like the blinding white light of heaven--and yet somehow far more menacing.

Her black hair gleamed like crow's wings, painted in the rainbow prism that bright illumination brings to the sheen of black feathers. It was a startling contrast to the white engulfing her, and it dazed him.

He slipped on something and nearly went down, desperately keeping Lionheart's point tipped up, keeping that last feeble defense between him and her power.

She lifted her hands and brought them together with a terrifying crash; illumination exploded between them, unting in one giant, effervescent sphere that she hurled at him.

It slammed into his chest and sent Seifer flying, Lionheart going one way, his body going another, and even before he landed he knew he was outmatched and in deep, deep shit. Her hand caressed his throat again, and now it was the creepy brush of an unwanted lover, tracing his windpipe with a veiled sort of meance that reminded him how easily she could crush him.

_"Where is Quistis Trepe, Seifer, and I'll let you go." _

He jerked his face out of her hands, eyeing the handle of Lionheart, glinting at him from too far away.

She tore into his face for real now, hooking her fingers beneath the bone of his jaw and jabbing deep with them, inserting the predator's talons that were her nails a half inch into his flesh. He screamed and kicked out futilely with his legs, grabbing her hands and feeling his own blood warm against the skin of his fingers, warm inside his mouth where it rested against the tongue, warm inside her flaring nostrils where it coiled--

Rinoa stumbled and sagged against him.

Seifer crawled from beneath her, trying to remember what it felt like not to hurt--and saw Squall standing over his fiancée holding Hyperion, looking like he wanted to throw up.

The gloved hand he extended toward Seifer shook violently, the other tight around Seifer's gun blade like it was the only thing holding him together.

"Hurry." Squall said, and it was the same cold, bland voice Seifer remembered--a little stressed around the edges, but held tightly in control for the most part. "Before she gets back up."

Seifer clasped fingers with a man he'd once tried to kill, and felt one brief, fleeting moment of brotherly comraderie with his one-time greatest rival as Squall handed Hyperion back to him and retrieved Lionheart.

They faced Rinoa together, wearing their identical scars and warrior's stances, one dark-haired, the other light, but never more similar than they were at this moment.

Around them, the entire structure shuddered threateningly.

* * *

Zell would have very much liked to know what the hell was going on--unfortunately, everyone else seemed just as much in the dark as he, and to top it off, Squall, Selphie and Irvine had all disappeared without a word.

Strung along the distant horizon where the sun was just beginning to inject a few traces of color into the black night, Galbadian warships appeared like ominous gulls, winging straight toward Garden and the sparking Sorceress Memorial with its periodic explosions of white.

He swallowed his anxiety for his friends and instead concentrated on strengthening Garden's perimeter defenses, arranging the more experienced students at the entrance and ordering the junior classmen into rooms that would hold for a while even in the midst of battle. He was not a leader, not like Squall or even Irvine with their cool-headed logic, but he knew the drill, and aside from Cid, who wasn't really in much shape to be leading a defense against hostile forces, Zell seemed the only one interested in taking up the mantle of responsibility.

He really, really wished Quistis were here right now. He could use her calm voice and soothing influence.

Ragnarok screamed through the sky above him as Zell pushed his way through nervous students and took up position on the very front line, the ground springy with fresh rain beneath him, swallowing his feet. His heart gave a euphoric little leap of joy to see the monstrous ship in action--it was only one against several, but he knew it carried an impressive weapons system. And Selphie--who was no doubt piloting it judging from its breakneck speed--was a crack shot with the machine. With her help, they'd gain a large advantage on any attackers.

He cried out in surprise when it streaked instead toward the Sorceress Memorial, engines whining thunderously.

"Hey. Hey! What are you doing?" he yelled, waving his arms in startled disbelief, like she could somehow see the tiny dot that was Zell Dincht among a sea of colored specks.

Beside him, another SeeD named Greg Dukley asked what the hell was going on. He felt like he'd swallowed acid as he replied that he didn't know, heart lodged painfully in his throat as he watched the titanic Ragnarok close in on the Memorial, as he watched Galbadia's ships broaden into the hard, intimidating outlines of swooping predators.

The phone he clenched in one sweating hand--he'd snagged it earlier, hoping frantically for some bit of news--buzzed suddenly, startling him. He fumbled and almost dropped it before snapping it open, his "Hello? Who is this? What's going on?" shrill and shaky even to his own ears.

"Zell…it's Irvine. Get everyone inside. Tell Nida to get Garden into the air again."

"Why?" he demanded, the blood rushing in his ears, each flutter of his pulse banging his heart into the side of his neck. "Irvine, come on man, tell me what's going on. Where are you?"

"On the Ragnarok, with Selphie. We're ok. Tell Nida, now."

"All right, I'm going to find him now." he said, turning and forcing his way back through the crowd, shouting for the foremost students to withdraw back into the school. "Tell me what's happening, man. Where's Squall? What's going on at the Memorial? What are you guys doing with the Ragnarok?"

The hiss of broken static crackled like a million bombs all going off at once in his ear. The bile that forced its way into his mouth tasted like fear and bitter, metallic adrenaline. It painted a shiny glaze across his lips, and he licked it clean, coaxing his stomach back down from his throat as he ran.

For once there was no stumbling or tripping, just coordinated, seamless motion, the same powerful grace he exhibited on the battlefield. It seemed like forever before he reached the elevator, but finally he did, and Irvine still hadn't said anything.

"Irvine. Hey, man, you still with me?"

"Yeah, Zell, I'm here."

"So what's going on?"

"Squall has ordered us to destroy the Sorceress Memorial. You guys need to get out of here, fast, ok? Don't try'n be a hero, Dincht. Squall said it's the only way now."

Zell's heart stopped, and he did stumble now, up against the elevator's smooth metal surface. The chill of it sank through the sweaty cheek he pressed to it, numbing right down to the bone. No. He hadn't heard that right; of course he hadn't. His hearing was already going, at the ripe old age of nineteen--he obviously needed to get into Dr. Kadowaki for a check-up, because he couldn't possibly have heard--"

"There's no other way to stop Ultimicea, Zell." Irvine continued, his tone strangely hushed. Zell almost didn't recognize the voice as his friend's--just as he didn't recognize the voice that emerged from his own mouth, trembling and sharp and tasting of vomit.

"No…no, that's not right. There has to be _something_--"

"Just get Garden out of the line of fire. Selphie and I will see you after everything's taken care of."

And that was it. Rinoa was going to die, and the only thing he had as an answer for the whole bewildering situation was a shrill dial tone, hurting his ear where it blared against the side of his head.

He lost precious moments standing there, his world sinking in flames around him, thinking about how Irvine had promised that Zell would see him and Selphie once everything was done--but there had been no mention of Squall.

* * *

Rinoa grinned, and that cruel mockery of her kind little smile hurt Squall worse than anything else.

_That's not Rinoa anymore. _he told himself, locking his teeth together tight enough to send vibrations of pain through his whole mouth.

Lionheart and Hyperion swept forward simultaneously--it was a beautiful maneuver worthy of two brilliant warriors like Squall and his one-time enemy. It was a move he'd have admired in a training video--but now he just felt void as the hit connected, sparking off Seifer's gun blade and not vulnerable flesh, as they'd intended.

She was gone.

Both men spun as the building gave another violent quake, Seifer moving automatically into position to guard Squall's back as a fira spell materialized out of nowhere and struck Garden's commander full-on in the chest.

He screamed as flames ate shirt and flesh, burning through the first layer of skin into the second, driving him to his knees. Curaga leapt from Seifer's fingers to Squall's charred torso, spreading in a wintry balm over the pain, and then the ex-knight was vaulting the kneeling commander's body, pursuing her into the rumbling building with Hyperion braced before him.

A resonating boom jarred the memorial right down to its very foundation, and Seifer stumbled into a wall.

"What the fuck is going on?" he screamed over his shoulder to Squall, now climbing unsteadily to his feet and flicking burned skin from his upper ribcage.

"It's Ragnarok." Squall replied, hair falling across his scar, agitated pink peeking through the bars of darkness his bangs dropped over it. "Selphie and Irvine are under orders to destroy the whole building--it was the only way I could think of to stop her."

Another earthquake jolt swept Seifer's legs from beneath him and sat him down hard on his ass. "Shit! You want to maybe fucking remind them that there are still people in here? Ones that aren't Ultimicea and didn't do anything to deserve getting blown up?"

Squall wordlessly grabbed him by the arm and hauled him back to his feet. "Get outside if you want." he said coldly. "I have to find her--Rinoa wanted me to stop Ultimicea. It's my fault for waiting too long."

Seifer paused a moment, studying the man who, under different circumstances, might have been a very good friend. There was far too much water under the bridge between them for that now, but still, the thought of Squall lingering behind in an exploding building didn't sit well with him. It may have been fucked-up, but he'd always thought he and Squall would probably die together, taken out by one another in one final glorious fight that ended with both men laid side by side, stabbed through the heart by the other's gun blade, warriors to the very end.

"She's probably already outside." Seifer pointed out.

"Then you look for her out there." Squall replied, already making his way into an adjoining corridor.

_Shit. _

Seifer scowled and trailed along behind him, trench coat snapping at his heels, Hyperion sitting cold and heavy in one hand.

It was funny, but streaked with dirt and blood and hurting all over, following Leonhart into certain death, Seifer felt more alive than he had in a long time. He probably should have taken that to show just how truly fucked up he was, but at that moment, he didn't really care. If he were to die with anyone by his side--if not Quistis--he would have wanted it to be Squall. Squall at least was a worthy opponent, and a decent man, whether or not Seifer wanted to admit that.

Both men broke into a jog as a terrific roar bellowed like a displeased animal, and one entire section of the memorial exploded in a colossal avalanche of swirling dust and falling wood.

Through Rinoa's eyes, Ultimicea watched the Ragnarok circle overhead.

It hung in the sky like some gigantic, shining bird of prey, letting lose a barrage of gunfire from a turret mounted on its port side that carved huge chunks of stone and wood from the Sorceress Memorial. Disturbed earth circled her battered form like a halo, dust and pieces of turf ripped from the ground bouncing harmlessly off the shell of protect she wrapped herself in.

Behind Ragnarok, Balamb Garden lifted clumsily into the air, sluggish and inept like a bird making its first attempt at flight. It glowed brightly, a beacon for the approaching warships streaking toward Esthar from the far horizon, tinged now in the first blushing hints of sunrise.

Ultimicea stalked toward the Galbadian airship resting several feet away, stepping over the bodies strewn in front of it like refuse, sparing just one quick, uninterested glance toward them before mounting the boarding strip.

The airship was just lifting off, hovering fifty feet or so above the memorial when it blew, ripping apart at its very seams and shooting pieces of foundation and ceciling beams in all directions, the entire thing crumpling like a skeleton suddenly emptied of all its internal organs.

Garden continued to rise like the sun to her left, painted in the approaching glow of morning.

* * *

Dr. Kadowaki's Office

Balamb Garden

It took two days to dig the bodies free from the remains of the Sorceress Memorial. There were five in all--Squall Leonhart, the three men working at the time of Ultimicea's escape, and one as-yet unidentified SeeD.

Only Garden's commander emerged alive.

They brought both men in on stretchers, Squall with his pale, bruised face uncovered and stoic as ever.

The other wore a blood-stained sheet over his motionless body, and Quistis forgot how to breathe when she saw that silent, white-draped form gliding inside the solemn quiet of Garden's main floor.

She knew very well who it had to be--she'd been a part of the rescue effort, and seen Dagan's body with her own eyes, scattered next to two Galbadian soldiers and a woman she suspected might have been Seifer's mother.

_"No, Quistis, it's…my Knight…They'll kill him if they catch him, Quistis, you have to…_

Seifer had been up to his neck in the entire situation--that much she could deduce, even if she didn't know his exact role.

Quistis sat beside that silent body now, alone except for Squall, asleep on his cot with an IV line stretching from his arm to the humming machine next to him, trying to gather enough courage to lift that sheet at last and stare down into his dead face.

Her fingers shook where they gripped one hem. She'd remained frozen in that position for over a half hour now, trying to accept that Seifer was well and truly dead even if a part of her couldn't quite accept that without visual evidence.

She didn't want to see those beautiful eyes shut permanently, Quistis thought, eyes stinging.

From the main room, she could hear Dr. Kadowaki's pen scratching paper, pausing occasionally and then tapping out a staccato little rhythm against her clipboard, hollow and resonating and too-loud in Quistis' ears.

_Seifer…_she thought, trying not to concentrate on the stinging as it blossomed into a jagged burn, slashing her eyes like razors.

She pressed her free hand into her eyes, pushing hard as though she were trying to push them back into the sockets themselves, and with the other yanked hard on the sheet, flipping it roughly out to fold down over his chest.

He looked…waxen, like a child's doll, china pale and slightly unreal.

She didn't cry. This was too painful even for tears--it reached all the way down into the core of her being, like a burn that penetrates completely through the skin to damage the nerves themselves. It was numbness. It was a hollow ache where her heart and her lungs and any spark of life should have resided.

Quistis bowed her head over him, very somberly, glasses slipping slightly down the bridge of her nose.

He reached up to gently nudge them back into place.

She jerked so violently the chair she sat in nearly flew out from beneath her, and the owlish incomprehension of her eyes, magnified by the familiar spectacles, actually pulled a small laugh from him. It turned into a ragged cough, and his fingers slid from her face to hold his ribs, while his face contorted in pain and she tried to collect the shattered pieces of her composure.

"You should have…ow shit…seen the look on your face, Trepe."

The numbness vanished, just like that, and for one horrible moment she wanted to kill him herself. She could take his pillow so easily, press it over his face…

"I thought you were _dead_!" she whispered hoarsely, her heart stuttering to life once more, chugging into out-of-control fluttering. "Seifer, Seifer I-"

"I fucking wish. Being dead doesn't hurt."

"I-"

He looked up at her and smiled, and there was nothing mocking in the expression--nothing arrogant or smug or amused, just a simple smile, and that was what undid her.

She sniffled violently and buried her face in her hands, shoulders jerking with the force of cries so wrenching they made no sound--it was a silent tragedy he watched, the scene dragging his heart into his throat, filling it so completely he could barely swallow.

He said nothing, because he remembered the last time he'd tried to 'comfort' her. But his hand did reach up to pull one of Quistis' from her face, and he wrapped his fingers lightly around hers, holding the mingled warmth of their skin close against his tender ribs.

"Knock it off." he said when she finally looked up, face streaked with moisture, but his tone didn't hold half its usual harshness. He reached up and brushed the final stubborn tears from her cheeks, thumb grazing her lips, the smile flashing slowly again, like rays of sunlight poking tentative strands of gold through stormy cloudbanks.

"You die just about every other day, Seifer." Quistis pointed out, lifting her chin.

He shrugged, then grimaced. "Yeah, you think you'd be used to it by now." His eyes shifted past her, to the other man lying pale and unconscious in his bed, the crisp blue sheets beneath him highlighting the deep circles under his eyes. "Leonhart all right?"

He felt her hand twitch slightly in surprise inside of his, and the line between his eyes deepened into a full blown scowl. "Not that I give a shit. Just making conversation."

"Squall is fine, for the most part. He has a second degree burn on his chest, but curaga was administered in time, so it should completely heal. Other than that, he's a collection of scrapes and bruises, but nothing permanent." _Just one very broken heart. _

"So what the hell is going on?"

Quistis stared at the scar between his eyes, suddenly tempted to run a finger along the one flaw of his handsome face, as though she needed that confirmation to prove that he was indeed real, like the pressure of his hand against hers wasn't quite enough. She shook the urge off, and tightened her fingers on his.

"Galbadia is occupying Esthar at the moment. Rinoa…Ultimicea is back in Deling City, in the Presidential Palace. She's taken control of the city. Balamb has officially declared war on Galbadia, and Trabia is expected to make a similar announcement within a few days."

"What about Garden?"

"Garden is, as you know, generally…politically neutral. But considering the circumstances, we'll be entering the war against Galbadia as well."

"With you out on the fucking front lines, right?" he demanded sharply.

"I have my duty, Seifer."

"Yeah, you always do, don't you." he snapped, looking away.

Quistis opened her mouth to reply, and then snapped it abruptly shut as Dr. Kadowaki's heels clicked their way across shiny tile toward them, and she glanced up to see the woman's maternal smile aimed in her direction.

"I'm sorry, Quistis, but without his disguise we had to report him dead. We were lucky enough as it was to get him free of the memorial without anyone noticing. I'll write up a certificate of death for Jace Keeling. Seifer, you'll have to take on another alias."

Quistis let go of Seifer's fingers and stood up, hands clasped in front of her. "Thank you, Dr. Were you part of the…false execution?"

"Yes." she said without looking up from her notebook as she checked Squall's vitals. "I helped Squall and Cid stage Seifer's death." Her big doe eyes glanced up then, simmering with a kindly warmth that banished the cold temporarily from Quistis' chest. "I thought he deserved another chance, just like you did."

Quistis stood there digesting that for a long moment as Dr. Kadowaki fussed over Seifer and he bitched about mother hens. She heard the woman tell Seifer she needed to give him a tetanus shot 'just as a precaution,' and then her heels clicked away across the room once more, leaving the two relatively alone.

"Hey." he said, drawing her attention around to him. "Give me a kiss."

Quistis started, her hands unwinding and lifting in the universal command of 'stop,' as though she braced herself against something unexpected. "A…kiss?"

"Yeah." He crossed his arms over his chest. "For good luck; I fucking hate needles."

She smiled then, because he reminded her so perfectly of the petulant little boy she'd known years ago.

The kiss she pressed to his forehead as she bent over him was warm and lingering and comforting, the rough scar tissue beneath her mouth suddenly a beautiful, beautiful thing, because it meant he was still here, still arrogant despite his imperfections, still Seifer.

She didn't know what the next few months or even the next day might bring, but it was a future much easier to face now with the knowledge that somehow, somewhere, his angry green eyes still existed.

She wanted to tell him just how grateful she was for that opportunity to lean over him lightly brushing his forehead with her soft, soft lips, but shyness stole the words, and so instead Quistis said "Good night, Seifer," and quietly let herself out.

He stared after her for a long time, wondering if his first experience with love was going to end as badly as Squall's.


	19. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen**

Communications Tower

Dollet

3 Months Later

A sniper's rifle is his heartbeat. It is the very flow of blood through his veins, and each tight breath that is compressed inside the lungs flies free on the bullet that explodes from its snout. It is a part of the man itself, like a piece of the soul chipped away and given physical form.

Irvine steadied his elbow on the tower's railing, sighted down his gun, and fired.

He felt the kill resonate in his chest, and it was not the firearm's recoil that caused the sick reverberation through his heart.

The head that flew apart in a geyser of red inside the crosshairs of his scope belonged to Edward Gant; the young woman that flipped in the head-over-heels tumble of a rag doll when his bullet entered her face used to be Marla Fuendahin.

It was so much harder to kill when you knew their names.

The setting sun smeared ruby light across his haggard face, the prominent cheekbones dipped in the eerie blood shine of vanishing daylight. It caressed his numb face like a lover's fingers, soft and warm and gentle, but it was a touch he didn't want. The sun's blinding gore bled into his eyes like their contorted faces, the kind of images that nothing short of death can erase.

His hands flexed in their fingerless gloves, frozen tight to the steel of Exeter.

Balamb was notorious for its mild winters--not like the permanent arctic wasteland that was Trabia, ravaged by flash storms that could freeze a man mid-step--but this day had dawned particularly bitter. The gunmetal sky held the promise of snow tight inside the charocoal puffs of its cloudbanks, though so far it had proved to be nothing more than a vague threat. It didn't really matter either way, Irvine supposed--not to those battling below him, spilling blood and intestines and brain fluid all over rock and sand. They were warm inside their cocoons of Protect and sweaty uniforms--too warm, in fact. He'd been a part of that brutal melee off and on over the past three days, and he knew the heat that exertion brought to the fluid limpness of overused muscles.

He shoved his stomach back down from his throat as he re-loaded his gun.

He cringed as someone's scream carried all the way up to him, and the sound of breaking bone snapped like a rabid dog at his ears. Each shriek of agony might be the dying ululation of a friend--Quistis' death scream, or Zell's final howl of pain. Even the screams of his enemies were not music to the ears, not the rich trumpet of victory that they must sound to others. Some of those enemy soldiers had been his comrades--he'd recognized SeeD's from G. Garden, men and women he'd trained and laughed and flirted with a long time ago.

The hat he tipped down over his face shaded his watering eyes.

He wanted to believe it was just the cold air, dragging its tines of ice over his pupils and filling the sockets with freezing water, but the burning in his throat wasn't vicious winter oxygen.

Exeter boomed again. He concentrated on his finger and the trigger beneath it, on the stroke of its very tip across glacial steel. The trigger couldn't be jerked, not if he wanted to hit his target; it had to be pulled smoothly, steadily, with just the very end of the finger. Most people tended to squeeze one eye shut, but he shot with both eyes open, because it increased the field of vision.

Above him, Ragnarok screamed through the gray sky, blasting sand and severed body parts into the air. He saw several bodies dressed in the uniform of Galbadia Garden cartwheel violently into the sea, sinking like his heart beneath the cherry stain of white-capped waves.

Through the gleaming circle of his scope, Irvine selected his next victim.

Quistis stood ankle-deep in blood and sand and slippery entrails, fighting for her life.

It was the true cinema of a soldier's life that whirled around her now: the garnet stain of the sun's bloody fingers across a turquoise ocean, and the broad crimson strokes of an artist's masterpiece on the glittering sands under her feet. The ground crunched like gemstones, like rubies, just as dazzling, blood-stained grains winking like stars in a faraway galaxy.

The whistle of bullets and the blast of grenades formed a merciless soundtrack.

Everywhere around her, people died. She'd never seen so much violence, so much suffering, in her entire life. She saw one young man with his guts ripped from the serrated hole of his stomach and wrapped half-way around his neck, a young woman--still alive--with both her legs blown into ragged stumps. Another man propped against the body of a fallen comrade, head sitting neatly in his lap, almost as though he'd carefully placed it there after it bounced from his neck.

Some were her enemy, but more of them seemed to wear the colors of her Garden.

She could hear Zell shouting down by the water's edge, and as she finally found a break in the fighting and paused to catch her breath, Quistis snuck a quick glance toward him. The unruly blonde spikes of his hair lay matted against his head with sweat and blood, but aside from a few minor lacerations here and there, most of it seemed to belong to other people. She was grateful for that at least; with Selphie and Irvine above the battle and relatively safe, that particular fear could at least loosen its claws from her. Seifer, thank Hyne, had been deployed elsewhere, and Squall was back at Garden, undertaking the stressful task of directing troops and deciding the next steps that should be taken.

Something spherical and black dropped out of the sky like an offering from heaven and struck her shoulder. It rebounded off and bounced at her feet, and--heart pounding in her throat--Quistis booted it back into the sky, where it arked toward the water and exploded harmlessly against the waves.

Some of the fighting pushed toward the line of foam scrawling a thick boundary between the beach and ocean, and she watched Zell transform into a blur of feet and fists and elbows, a deadly tornado of precisely-placed blows. He was awe-inspiring to watch, and it never failed to amaze her that that was _Zell_--sweet, clumsy, sometimes foolish Zell--with his teeth locked in a shattering war cry and his awkward hands splintering bone and tearing cartilage like tissue paper.

She waded into the thick of the fighting swinging her whip, snatching one man's eyeball right out of his head with the barbed tongue of it, splitting another's cheek right down to the bone.

In the deadly clash, everyone smeared together, like colors dripping into one another on a ruined painting. Soliders closed around her like a noose, and Quistis realized with a sharp pain like a knife in her gut that most of the soldiers still standing were not B. Garden SeeDs. She could feel her breath scraping raw and burning over her lips, and the ache of over-exhausted muscles screamed a million profanities inside her head.

They were losing.

Even Ragnarok hung back now, reluctant to fire on this bewildering crush of bodies for fear of hitting allies.

To her left, Zell grabbed a man by the lapels of his uniform and sat down hard, slamming his boots up into the man's stomach and launching him screaming into the air, to land with a splash in the tarnished ocean water. He rolled to his feet and came up punching, twirling agilely, there and gone again before many soldiers could even blink.

She couldn't quite match his blinding speed in hand to hand, but there was no one more proficient with her particular weapon.

Quistis' whip cracked like a thunderclap, and she knocked a woman's gun from her sweaty grasp, taking one hand with her, the frayed stump of the wrist spurting gore.

Rising majestically in her peripheral vision, the communications tower poked a few sharp spires into the sky, interrupting the line of fiery clouds with its spindly architecture. And the sun, that flaming, dying sphere that burned as hot as the breath in her chest…the sun balanced on the tallest spire as though impaled through its middle, throwing streamers of blood down over the building.

She backed up into cold, stinging seawater, submerging herself to the knees.

They were really and truly losing, Quistis thought, and she might die here with nothing but the damp leather grip of her whip clenched tight in her hand and an inch of cold steel through her brain.

Irvine, from his higher vantage point, spotted the reinforcements first.

They clouded the horizon like a swarm of insects, their sleek noses plowing through choppy water, pushing foam in front of and behind them as they rode that crimson mirror surface hard toward Dollet's beach.

His breath misting white in front of him, Irvine clapped his hands down on the railing, his heart pulverized inside his chest by some great fist. If back up was arriving, that meant they were in bad shape down there on that red beach--one of those death shrieks could very well have been Quistis', or Zell's.

Not knowing killed him.

He clutched Exeter--his heartbeat, his lifeline--in shaking hands, and re-loaded again.

Each clunk of an entering bullet rang on forever in his ears; he could do it by feel alone now, so he kept his eyes on those approaching steel mammoths, sending up a silent prayer to Hyne.

Because war didn't distinguish, and just because he loved his friends so much it hurt not knowing if they were still alive, it didn't make them safe. On that battlefield below him, every dead man and woman was a loved one, a cherished face waiting to be buried six feet beneath uncaring loam.

He stared up at the hovering Ragnarok, grateful at least that Selphie was safe, unharmed. Her death might destroy him, just like Rinoa's would surely shatter Squall when it finally came, possessed sorceress or not.

Exeter jumped in his twitchy hands, and he murmured soothing nonsense to himself under his breath. Strangely enough, it was Squall's words that he recalled now, the welcome if somewhat taciturn reassurances that he'd spoken on top of that spinning, jangling carrousel while Irvine trembled like a frightened child at the thought of his bullet making history.

He wished the hard-faced commander was beside him now, but he was alone--and still a soldier, so, catching his breath in a hard knot inside his chest, Irvine lined up his shot once more, and took it.

_Hurry…For Hyne's sake, hurry. _

Seifer stood in the open mouth of the bulky metal warship, hair blowing in the wind and his heart jumping like a spastic, panicked bird.

He ignored the burning spray that kicked up into his face and eyes. The lurch of metal under his boots was such a distant, petty thing in comparison to that beach with its gory sands and its scatter of bodies--any one of which could be hers.

This thing wasn't fucking moving fast enough, not by far, and he fought the urge to leap over its side into the boiling waters, and simply swim the rest of the way.

_Hurry, dammit…_

He never would have thought loving Quistis would be easy--but he'd never dreamed it could be so damn _hard_, so gut-wrenching and terrifying. Each phone call to Garden could be a report carrying news of Instructor Trepe's untimely demise, each knock on his door a solemn-faced Squall bearing information of her death. Since the beginning of the war, he didn't think his stomach had unknotted the entire time, because even if she wasn't in danger at that very moment, she would be in a matter of days, or even hours, while he clung stubbornly to the stupid childhood conviction that nothing bad could happen to her, simply because he didn't _want _it to.

The beach and the mob of struggling, bleeding, dying bodies it supported flared like a nightmare come to life before Seifer's eyes; the nose of the ship ran hard aground, and he grabbed for the side of the doorway as the jolt threatened to unbalance him.

Then he was down on the sand and running like a madman as the nose sank forward with a groan into soft silt, the sea and the scarlet beach swallowing his boots like reaching hands. His weapon cleared its sheath before he'd even reached the fight, and he swooped in like a darting bird of prey, stabbing here, gutting there as around him a shout of jubilation swelled from B. Garden's remaining SeeDs.

Where was her fucking voice? Where was her shining blonde head, dusted in the liquid dye of war, and her pale face, splattered with the color of her enemy's blood?

His enemies blurred together in front of him; he lost count of how many died on the point of his blade. It wasn't Hyperion by any means, but it was a decent enough weapon, and he had two pistols strapped to his body as well--one at the waist, another at the ankle--not to mention several grenades hanging like ripe fruit from his belt.

He snarled with animal fierceness, and slashed a man in half from his sternum to his groin.

She was here somewhere in this blood-spattered horror show--he fucking _knew _she was. Squall himself had said Quistis was helping bolster Dollet's meager defenses, and if he didn't see her still standing, still fighting here on this death strip of sand and water, than that meant…that meant--

_No_. His mind blocked the thought, because just the barest scrape of that possibility kicked him low down, a solid blow to the gut.

Seifer reversed his weapon and smashed a man in the teeth with the handle, and he went down spitting blood and shiny white seeds. He choked down the urge to scream her name--in the crash of battle and the scream of the unfortunate, she probably wouldn't hear him anyway, and if she did it might fatally distract her.

The tide of the battle begin to turn quickly with the reinforcements bubbling from the snouts of the three war ships beached at even intervals along the waterline. Galbadia's troops soon began to retreat back up the beach, pursued by several tenacious SeeDs, while he stayed behind, breathing hard like a winded man finishing his first marathon, and thinking about how he still didn't see her.

He did spot Chicken Wuss, disheveled and streaked with guts and dark liquid, kneeling beside someone spread out over the sands, the upper half of the face buried under greedy ocean.

His heart stopped.

He shoved his way toward the tragic little tableu, slamming his weapon back into his belt, wondering how long a man could taste bile before actually throwing up. He couldn't find his voice to ask Zell the dreaded question, so instead he just dropped to his knees beside the sobbing martial artist, who was now trying to drag what was unquestionably a woman from the sea.

Seifer choked on his heart, crammed so far into his throat now that he couldn't breathe.

It wasn't Quistis. The young woman's hair carried a reddish glint to it--it looked almost chestnut now, darkened by the waves that curled over it, and she wore the garb of a medic, not a soldier.

Come to think of it, hadn't Chicken Wuss been dating Dr. Kadowaki's assistant for a while now or something? He seemed to remember Quistis mentioning something like that to him at one point.

"Bria! Bria!" Zell screamed, gagging on her name.

Seifer rested his hands on his knees. She shouldn't have been anywhere near this place--he knew medical personnel were often involved in warfare, because medical care nearby often meant the difference between life and death, but in his opinion anyone not trained in killing needed to simply keep away until the action was over.

On an impulse, he grabbed her wrist--and felt a pulse, weak, fading, but there, thumping raggedly against his fingers.

"She's not breathing." Zell cried out, and whether he was speaking to himself or the man crouching next to him, Seifer didn't know.

"Her lungs are probably full of water, fuckwit." Seifer replied harshly, and reached over to pound her sharply in the chest. A couple of solid blows rocketed her upright in Zell's arms, coughing water down her chin.

He stood, leaving Zell on his own from there. She might die anyway--who knew how badly she was injured, but there was nothing else he could do, and Quistis meant more to him than either Chicken Wuss or some random girl stupid enough to put up with Zell.

He was flipping over a body with long blonde hair when she just appeared, out of nowhere, blinking into existence at the corner of one eye like some phantom apparition.

Smeared in blood and smelling of death, she was an avenging angel, and she'd never looked more beautiful to him.

"You're supposed to be in Esthar, aren't you?" she asked tiredly, completely oblivious to how badly he wanted to yank her into his arms and hold her there forever, where he'd never let anything touch her again.

He groped for his voice, finding it after a moment of silence that stretched taut between them. "I'm on leave for a couple of days. Leonhart heard you guys were in trouble and sent back-up, so I came along for the ride."

"Have you seen Zell?" Quistis wanted to know, eyes wide and hollow in her pale, pale face.

He jerked his chin toward the hyper young man and his girlfriend, and just like that, she was done with him. She swept by him like he was just another ally, just another nameless face in that sea of people that had died around her, just another unknown SeeD that mattered less to her than her true family.

It hurt when she brushed past him, and he patched the sucking wound her dismissal left with a scowl.

* * *

Dorms

Balamb Garden

When Quistis opened her door and found him sprawled across her bed with his hands tucked behind his head and his eyes focused on the ceiling, she felt frustration pop like an exploding bubble inside her throat, and the pressure of it nearly exited in a scream.

It was confrontation time, apparently, when all she wanted was to shower the stink of battle off her, enjoy a very hot cup of tea, and then collapse into the soft oblivion that was her mattress.

"I broke your door." he said conversationally. "Sorry."

"I noticed." she sighed, remembering the dark eye of the light on her door's keypad. "And I doubt you are."

"Doubt I'm what?" he demanded, sounding churlish.

"Sorry. You rarely are, Seifer."

She walked over to her desk and pulled the blood-soaked hair tie from her long mane, tossing it down beside her computer and shaking blonde waves out into one fanning spray of gold across her back. For one moment, she thought--childishly--that if she just closed her eyes, maybe he would disappear.

She didn't bother testing that particular theory, though, because Seifer never just disappeared, not unless it suited his own purpose. Seifer never did anything unless it suited his own purpose.

He stood up while she rifled through one of the desk's drawers for her comb.

"Quistis." he said roughly, and when she turned with another quiet sigh, he was suddenly there, his hands on her cheeks, his lips pressing hard into hers. He crushed her against the front of him, trapping her up against his chest, where she hung limply in shock.

It was not the greeting she'd expected, and it took her a moment or so to recover. When she'd finally gathered her wits enough to respond, she struggled in his grasp, splaying her hands over his chest and attempting to push him away. It took him several long seconds to finally realize she was rejecting his advances and pull back, fluttering his eyes a little hazily, lips slightly damp.

"Don't, Seifer. I'm covered in blood and dirt."

He blinked at her for a moment, then scowled. "So?"

"So I'd like to take a shower and then go to bed. It's been a very long day." _A very long three months, actually. _

He crossed his arms, looking huffy. "Well pardon me for thinking you might be glad to see that I wasn't, you know, fucking _dead _or something."

Quistis rubbed her temples, feeling a headache coming on. "Let's not get into something, please. I'd just like to relax right now. I'd appreciate it if you left."

Seifer blew out his breath in one long, furious exhalation and sat back down on her bed, hard. A disturbed ripple passed over the neatly-made blankets, like harsh wind over a tranquil pond, pinching Quistis' brows together in a wince.

She wished, for once, that he wouldn't make things so difficult. "I _am _glad to see you're all right, Seifer; I just don't have time for this right now."

"Don't have time for what? Me?"

"For arguing with you."

"We haven't seen each other in over a month, and the last time it was only for a couple of hours, with Wuss there the whole time."

"Don't call him that." Quistis said calmly. She turned her back on him to arrange the papers on her desk, which looked slightly out of place to her critical eye--had he rummaged through her things?

"Why are you avoiding me?" Seifer snapped, unrelenting.

He was still so much like that short-tempered, green-eyed child he'd been a long time ago sometimes--angry when he didn't get his way, pushy and stubborn when he wanted something. She didn't quite know how to answer him, not without setting him off, at least. But it was easy to do that anyway, and in his current agitated state, any little thing would probably set him off.

"I'm not avoiding you, Seifer. I just--" _Watched several of my students die today, not to mention spent nearly an hour calming Zell and attempting to persuade him that Bria was going to make it. _She sighed again and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Like I said, it's been a very long day. Please don't draw it out."

He fell silent finally, just the abrasive in and out of his breath whistling in the room's silence, and she thought he would finally get the point and excuse himself. Well, 'excusing himself' was far too polite by Seifer's standards; more likely, his exit would involve slamming doors and muttered swearing.

Instead, he surprised her again. "Are you all right?"

It was gruff, reluctant, as though he weren't quite sure how to form the words, but the edge of pouty rage had vanished.

She glanced down at her hands, knotted tightly together now to hide their faint tremor, eyes filling slightly. How long had it been since someone had asked her that? End this young man's life forever--kill this woman before she can have a husband and children and a bright future--bury this student, and don't think about how he used to always knock on wood to keep from jinxing himself, and don't cry while doing it; you're a mercenary, and this is your job--blood and death is your whole life--

But never, 'Are you all right?'

"I'm tired." Quistis said huskily.

She heard him sigh and the squeak of bedsprings relaxing as his weight lifted off them. "Quistis."

"Seifer, I'm fine. It's just…an adjustment. I haven't been so immersed in warfare for a while now, and today's battle was one of the bloodiest I've seen. But this is what I trained for, and I don't need you to coddle me." _You're not my knight, and I'm not your damsel in distress, not like Rinoa used to be. _

Thinking of Rinoa knifed pain through her heart, and she folded a little around it.

"I fucking hate this." he said after a while, reaching out to brush aside a gleaming strand of her hair. She blinked up at him while he tucked it behind an ear, thinking how beautiful he was; not pretty just truly marvelous, like the statue of a god, tall and imposing and forever arrogant. The chiseled jaw lay beneath a scruff of blonde beard now, just a faint shadow stubble of hair--it was partially his disguise, partially just that he hadn't had the chance to shave lately. He'd flatly refused another wig for his next identity--Devon Ryson--and at one point, Quistis had seriously thought he and Squall were going to come to blows over that particular argument. In the end, Seifer had to cover his scar and revert to colored contacts once more--bright cornflower blue this time--but had managed to fight off any other alterations. The simplicity of it was surprising, really; take away the scar and that flaming emerald gemstone gaze, and suddenly he was just another good-looking blonde young man.

He'd peeled the latex coating from his scar as usual and removed his contacts; he always did that when he was with her. It warmed Quistis a little that he liked to let his guard down around her, but it also left her in constant terror that someday someone would just walk in on them to find Quistis Trepe consorting with the dead traitor.

"War is necessary sometimes." she replied, cool and logical as ever, the Ice Queen again even though the warmth of his body sent her heartbeat into spastic stop-and-start bursts of motion.

"Yeah, and every day it keeps going you might die." He scowled, looking away.

She tried not to, but at his words the cage of frost she built around her heart--the survival pen she sewed tightly shut around it to survive the warn-torn shambles of her life--melted under the scorching heat that was his voice. His worry shouldn't electrify her--but it did, because it meant that for every moment she'd spent in agony wondering if he were bleeding out under the monstrous bulk of an artillery shell, he'd been fretting similarly.

"I won't die, Seifer." Quistis assured him.

"Only _I'm_ immortal, Instructor."

She smiled a little, and gently leaned her face into his chest, hesitant to display this little weakness, but so exhausted and bruised that for the moment it didn't really matter. It was just the two of them, and she knew he'd figured out a long time ago that she wasn't the frigid woman she wanted everyone to think she was. _I'd like to believe you're immortal…_

He wrapped his arms around her back.

"I've missed you, Seifer." There was a hesitant curl of shyness in her words, and it annoyed him that he still found that cute.

"Then you won't mind me joining you in the shower?"

She punched him lightly in the shoulder.

"Where's Puberty Boy sending you now?" he asked after a moment of silence, his arms still pressing her shoulders tight to either side of her body.

Quistis sighed heavily again, regretting for a fleeting moment that there was never anything to talk about now but war and death and unbearable loss. "I don't know. I'm supposed to report back to him after I've had a chance to clean up."

He was silent for a long time, just holding her firmly against him.

Part of Seifer wanted her in Esthar, where he could keep an eye on her. But the revolution there against the invading Galbadian army was a particularly brutal one, the kind of bloodbath he wanted her far, far away from. Trepe could more than handle herself--he of anyone ought to know that--but sometimes he harbored the suspicion that some of Galbadia's soldiers were fucking superhuman…the feats they pulled off, their strength and speed…it reminded him eerily of the assassin who'd attacked Quistis in their motel room back in Glacen City.

He bent his head to the top of hers, and even though she smelled of blood and death and that metallic perfume of gun powder that is a tinny flavor against the taste buds, Seifer buried his face in her hair. He was really damn tired of waking up each morning wondering if she was still alive, and even though the moment struck him as a little too Chicken Wuss or Puberty Boy for his own taste, he couldn't help it. If he could just stand here, inhaling the raspberry scent of her shampoo buried somewhere far beneath blood and war, he'd never really want for anything else again. Even if it was all the farther she let him go--he just needed to touch her, to reassure himself, as embarrassingly maudlin as that might be.

His lips grazed her forehead, and Seifer shut his eyes.

"Seifer." she murmured. "I really do need to--"

He kissed her to shut her up. It was a brief, almost brutal thing, and when he pulled back, she stared wide-eyed up at him, looking startled and heartbreakingly exhausted at the same time.

"You can't spend two damn minutes with me?" he griped.

"It's been--" She turned her head to check the computer's clock behind her. "--nearly a half hour." An almost-smile coiled her lips, because he looked like a pouting child again, and even though his stubborness aggravated her sometimes, it could also somehow be so ridiculously endearing.

She slipped out of his arms, and he stood there for a moment, staring at the empty space between them. "Good night, Seifer. Cover your forehead back up before you leave."

"I'm only on leave from Esthar for a day or two." he blurted out, crossing his arms over his chest. He looked imposing, towering over her with that angry line drawn through the deep trench of his scar, though whether it was intentional or not she didn't know. Intentional or not, his ability to bully her had always been seriously impeded by her courage--whether Quistis realized it or not, her bravery even more than her persistence had carried her to where she stood today.

A lesser woman would have melted before the green fire of those eyes a long time ago.

"Seifer, please. I need to shower and then report to Squall."

"Fuck Leonheart tonight."

She raised an eyebrow. "I'm sure that wasn't meant the way it sounded."

He frowned at her. "I mean blow him off. He can wait." _It's been more than a month since I last saw you. _

"There's a war going on." she said coolly. "In light of that, everything else takes a bit of a backseat."

"What's that supposed to mean?" His voice was an animal snarl, feral and sharp and nasty--but somehow frightened as well, like the predator that suddenly finds itself cornered by something even larger than itself. "That the amazing Instructor Trepe can't lower herself to speak to her old student, because she's too busy saving the world?"

"I think you want to do more than speak, Seifer." Quistis pointed out wryly.

His jaw clenched. "You know what? You've been jerking me around on a fucking string for _months _now. I don't even know what the hell is going on anymore. Mind enlightening me, _Instructor_?"

There was the old emphasis again, making her suddenly feel as though her hard-won title was somehow impure, or wrong. She hated that he could do that to her, and it raised the ice shield in her eyes once more, spreading tendrils of frost down her spine, wrapping the bony column and pulling it ramrod straight.

She perused him with her teacher's eyes, the disapproving stare that belonged behind shiny spectacles, flashing sun-flares of light with each turn of the head. "I don't know what you expect from me, Seifer."

"Yes, you damn well do." he argued. "I told you exactly how I felt, and you told me you felt the same way, and then spent the next few months fucking ignoring me. I'm getting really damn _sick _of it."

Quistis turned her head away, struck with the sudden hammer blow of his rage. It felt like a gut punch, like a handful of cold fingers shoved into her solar plexus to prize free the trembling, leaden mass that was her heart. He was right; she hated to admit it, even to herself, but he was right and she was wrong. It was unfair to him, to be dragged along like some old blanket that is ratty and grimy and mostly unwanted, kept around only because the owner can't bear to part with it for a few fading sentimental reasons.

"You're right." she said it aloud, and almost choked on the words. "I'm sorry; you're right, Seifer. This isn't fair to you."

Something flickered in his jade gaze. This was where she made another excuse, where she told him she needed time, or--Hyne forbid--used the dreaded 'actually, let's just be friends' line.

He swore to Hyne, if those words left her mouth, he might as well just shoot himself in the head. Seifer Almasy did not spend such a significant portion of his life agonizing over a _woman _just to get the brush-off.

"I'll see Squall tomorrow morning." she said quietly. "Just let me take a shower, and then we can discuss…things."

* * *

They didn't talk much. In fact, he spent a good portion of his stay that night watching her sift through various e-mails--mostly from lovestruck Trepies--and grousing about her locking the bathroom door before she started undressing.

When she fell asleep around midnight, it was with her back propped against a stack of pillows, a book open across her chest, and her feet in his lap.

Sitting at the other end of the bed, Seifer had a good vantage point, and he used it to watch her dream.

With her soft hair spilled like fallen sunshine around her and those long eyelashes pooled in crescent moon shadows beneath the eyes, Quistis was untainted, and perfect once more. The livid splashes of blood on those marble cheeks had ruined the illusion, the curved bruises of fatigued shadows under her eyes turning her human once again. It was hard to remember sometimes that she was just as fragile, just as brittle as the rest of the population when she resembled some untouched angel.

Looking at her now, he had to remind himself again that she wasn't the block of passionless, tedious ice that he'd once carelessly classified her as. Underneath all that rigid discipline, she was a woman, and in her own wary, noncommittal way, she loved him.

Or, at least, she'd said she did, and he damn well hoped it was true, because somewhere along the way he'd started needing that. He'd always prided himself on not needing anyone other than himself--but that wasn't really true, and it never had been. When he'd lost his brother and his parents, he'd had the orphanage gang. When he'd lost them, he'd gained his posse. And now…now he had Quistis. For all his independence, in the end Seifer Almasy was just like everyone else; he needed the kind of love that wasn't his own poorly-disguised self-hatred packaged in false adoration.

It was an odd combination, arrogance and self-loathing. But he'd always juggled them evenly, and he'd never even bothered to notice just how lonely he really was. Until Quistis.

He looked down at her feet, encased in a pair of soft, fuzzy socks and looking so unbelievably tiny that Seifer wondered absentmindedly how she found shoes that fit properly.

His eyes flickered back to her face, sliding down the closed eyes to the rose petal blush of her lips. He still stole kisses; she never really offered him any affection, and whether that was because the concept of unmelting a little for another human being still felt awkward to her, or if the reason were a little more grave, he didn't know.

Once, when he'd actually roped her into an embrace that lasted more than a few seconds, he'd tried to take it a bit farther--he was a man, after all--and had slipped one hand down her pants. Just to the top of her panties, a teasing graze that he intended to take farther, until she jerked away like he'd burned her, staring him in the face with the doe-eyed fright of an animal caught in headlights.

It bothered him even now. He didn't think that expression had been repulsion--no, that had been unadulterated terror, jarring and completely out of place on her icy features. It made him wonder what kind of childhood she'd experienced before arriving at Garden.

A light knock on her door jolted Quistis from sleep; the book slipped down to her stomach, then tumbled over the side of her bed with the dull smack of worn binding on carpet. "Get in the bathroom!" she hissed at him, standing up quickly and trying to smooth her hair into place.

He rolled his eyes, but complied for once--if a little more slowly that she would have preferred.

She opened the door to Squall's unreceptive gaze, the thin, hard line of his lips schooled into grim blankness. She marveled sometimes at how he did that--considering his recent loss of Rinoa, the man had to be a raging turmoil of misery and uncertainty on the inside, and yet not a single hint of it appeared on his face.

Quistis let him inside. She'd barely shut the door before he snapped around to look at her, a military sharp about-face he executed perfectly, and asked "Is Seifer here?"

The question caught her off guard, and she took a moment to reply. "I sent him into the bathroom; he isn't disguised."

The bathroom door lurched open halfway through her explanation, and Garden's most famous rebel waved lackadaisically. It was a two-fingered little salute he tossed Squall, lazy and bordering on disrespect.

Squall ignored the gesture. "We have a problem."

"Which would concern me how?" Seifer demanded, crossing his arms and leaning one broad shoulder against the door frame. It was poses like that which reiterated to Quistis just how large he really was--Raijin's width outmatched him, of course, but Seifer carried a taut musculature on his tall frame that dwarfed Squall and made anything he did seem vaguely threatening. Of course, most things he did were meant to be vaguely threatening at best, but still.

"Someone is at the front gate, asking for you."

"What do you mean, asking for him?" Quistis cut in. "Asking for Seifer, or for Devon?"

"For Seifer."

"That's impossible." Quistis argued. "The only ones who know he's still alive are you, me, Cid, and…"

"Ultimicea." Seifer interrupted her.

Squall's eyes sharpened. "I doubt Ultimicea would knock politely on Garden's front door and ask nicely to see you."

"Don't be a douche, Leonheart. I wasn't suggesting it was her." The two men shared a scowl. With their cold eyes and identical scars, it was an eerily disorienting moment for Quistis. She thought for a second that they could almost be brothers--until Squall's face relaxed slightly into his usual impassive smoothness, and she mentally corrected herself. Squall didn't have that same feral, wicked quality that burned in Seifer's eyes, like the caged jungle cat just waiting for its one chance at freedom. Seifer's gaze was the suspicious glare of a man who searched for the worst in everyone and was certain of finding it. His was a bitter, clouded look, Squall's distrust far more carefully sealed.

"It's a man claiming to be your brother."

The announcement hurt; Seifer recoiled like he'd just taken a foot of cold steel through the stomach, the invisible blade thumb-tacking his spine to the wall behind him. "My brother's _dead_." he snarled.

Quistis very slowly folded her hands in front of her, staring through the room's dimness into his turbulent eyes. "Seifer…are you sure? You were young. Could you have somehow been mistaken?"

He snorted. "If Jacob wasn't dead, then burying him was a pretty big fucking mistake."

"Why would someone show up now pretending to be your brother?" Squall asked, looking impossibly stern.

"How the hell should I know, Puberty Boy?" Seifer stepped forward, pushing off the door frame with hands clenched at both sides, fairly trembling with the potent rage that radiated off him in gusts of hostility that Quistis could almost feel, raking cold phantom fingers down her spine.

She eased carefully between them. "Where is he?" she asked Squall.

"In my office."

"All right." She laid a gentle hand on the corded steel of Seifer's forearm. "Let's get this settled then."

* * *

He'd swallowed a burning rock. He fucking _must _have, because surely nothing else could cause a lump this big, this searing, inside his throat, where it sat quietly chewing through his windpipe.

The man sitting across from him was Jacob, fifteen years after his death. The ash-blonde bangs, grown a little shaggy over his forehead, dripping into eyes green as sun-dappled bottle glass, green as warm spring meadows--green as his mother's dying gaze--they were all _his_. A slightly crooked upper lip flared into the tentative child-grin that still prickled Seifer's heart like broken glass.

He couldn't breathe--oh _fucking Hyne _he couldn't breathe--

Quistis, standing behind him, lightly touched his shoulder.

His voice retreated to a strangled whisper; he breathed snide cruelty back into it with every last ounce of his willpower, and stabbed an accusing finger into the young man's face. "What the hell kind of joke is this?"

The fair eyebrows crumpled into a pained frown. "Hey…Seifer, don't you remember me?"

"Yeah." the ex-knight spat harshly. "I remember you _dying_. I remember watching them throw dirt onto your fucking face--so who the hell are you really?"

The wounded flash in the eyes of this man who looked disturbingly similar to Seifer appeared genuine--but something percolated at the back of Quistis' mind, and she eased slightly away from Seifer's chair, one hand going to her whip. Maybe it was simply paranoia, born from too many days of gory battles, of enemies popping up out of nowhere with her death bright like a captive sun in their eyes--but something whispered for her to uncoil her weapon, which she discreetly did.

She grasped the answer a second before the young man's head began to split apart, his false skin peeling apart around the white dome of his skull, holding its scraps of bloody, nerve-exposed skin. "He's a fake! Squall, it's a decoy, like President Deling's!" Quistis shouted.

The creature lunged for Seifer as Squall sprang forward--

And Quistis tasted her heart, that bloody, heavy mass of beating tissue gelling to her throat as the thing clenched a hand around Seifer's neck. The shriveled strips of its flesh danced like the miniature braids of a child, reflecting glistening magenta under the room's lights.

Those starbursts of red were like exploding planets before her eyes, all-consuming and terribly, fascinatingly beautiful.

She struck with her whip as Lionheart completed its glittering pendulum swing, and in that single split second of time before the mind registered death, before the head bounced from its shoulders, it looked up from the contorted, gasping features of Seifer Almasy to the pale winter-glow of Quistis Trepe.

The lips stretched in a smile. "_Hello, Quistis Trepe_."

The smile went instantly slack a moment later, like a snapped rubber band, and the decoy's skull smacked wetly on the floor.

It was a sound that echoed on forever in Quistis' ears.

Seifer broke out in ragged coughing, and it took her a second to recover enough from the intrusion of that thing's voice inside her head to go help him.

He flung aside the hand that she placed gently on his elbow, holding his throat as he sat up, eyes bloodshot and predator fierce. "Get Quistis out of Garden. _Right now_."

* * *

Presidential Manor

Deling City

The mirror stared coldly back at her.

It was a sweet, sweet face she'd stolen--they always were, and Ultimicea spent a moment admiring this latest theft with Rinoa's tender dove eyes.

It was those which had changed most of all. Seifer had marked the white skin during their last confrontation, and now tiny red scar veins of imperfection marred her cheekbones and forehead--but those were faint blemishes, and easily covered with a little makeup. It was the gaze, that stare of impervious black stone, that truly marked the difference between Rinoa and what now lived inside her. Their shape and size remained unaltered, but that spark of fiery compassion Squall's little princess had wielded beneath her thick lashes was completely gone. Ultimicea's spirit turned them hard, sharp, utterly ruthless--it was the look of an ambitious ruler, the kind without loyalties to any other human being, the kind that will kill family simply to get ahead.

Rinoa's pink mouth transformed into bloody madness as Ultimicea twisted red lips- ticked lips into a hideous smile; skillful touches of blacks and bruised violets changed her eyes into something exotic and enchanting and frightening.

The slender body's former inhabitant was well and truly gone. Ultimicea could only feel her presence rarely now, and so feebly that she laughed every time she experienced Rinoa's continuing efforts to claw her way to the surface.

She turned from the mirror, and stepped out into the evening's probing wind. Her elaborate dress chimed musically as she walked, feathers and beads and fragrant silks all rubbing against one another to form a permanent soundtrack. It was a noise the wind snatched up in greedy fingers, and carried over the railing of the balcony she looked out over.

Ultimicea inhaled crisp winter oxygen--and shut her eyes.

Behind her closed lids, she played out her final memories of Seifer, like a disjointed movie that flickered with candle-flame irregularity on her own private screen.

_-"Shut up. Don't pretend to give a shit about me. I'm not doing this for you."-_

_-His scream of tortured desperation…the silver lightning flash of his weapon…the faded strawberry of his coat, enveloping him like a tattered cloud-_

_-"I said _shut the fuck up!_"-_

_-His contorted face, the scarred visage of her Knight still beautiful even as the monster that wore his brother's face--more stolen innocence--strangled the life from that thundering, lion-fierce heart-_

Her eyes jumped eerily behind her lids, and she scowled as she remembered.

Seifer Almasy was shit. Just an insignificant parasite, the kind that fed off men in petty little doses and considered himself clever and powerful for doing so. She'd shown him true power, real strength, changed him from trivial bully into something truly important.

And he spat in her face. The same way those little brats had, hundreds of years ago before she even recognized what she was really capable of.

_-"I'm not your fucking knight, bitch." -_

The railing beneath her petite, fragile little hand flexed where she gripped it, and creaked in warning.

He was no better than those boys who'd pinned her under their cruel, rough hands and ripped her dress right down the center--

_-"Hold her legs open!"-_

_-Oh Hyne please please please please please no no no!! Don't let them do this to me, don't let this be happening-_

_-Shivering peasant fingers tracking a slug's trail of sweat between her legs-_

It was a flash of memory that still sapped every square inch of breath from her, the kind of recollection that shattered the jail bar spears of ice that caged the shriveled, unfeeling mass of her heart.

She slumped against the railing, prying her eyes open. The sky looked unnaturally vivid to her, the rosy blush of day's farewell flashing blood bright across her retinas.

She burned the shadow presences of Seifer Almasy and those disgusting bastards from her mind, imagining their fading ghosts writhing in agony beneath the twisting flames that sprang from her fingertips.

The jeweler's gold of blonde hair was the last to dissipate from the blank canvas she made of her mind. _Do you think you can just use me like I'm nothing, my Knight? Is she really so much better than me? What can Quistis Trepe give you? Is your love for her really stronger than your ambition? Than your loyalty to me? _

Far below her now, the sun drowned in a distant ocean.

* * *

Squall Leonhart's Office

Balamb Garden

He wanted to punch Seifer in the face. It was far from a new emotion that climbed into Squall's throat with the heat of molten rock, but it seemed more pronounced than usual.

The ex-knight towered him, and he was starting to feel a little ridiculous for coming out of his chair the way he had, as though he intended to get up in Seifer's face--which was quite obviously impossible, considering the man had a good six inches on him. Standing on the chair he'd abandoned would have put them on a more equal playing field, but he doubted that would do much for his dignity.

"I'm telling you, Puberty Boy," Seifer sneered, "Whether you want to hear it or not, Esthar's gonna' fall. Soon. Probably within a couple of days. They're almost to the Presidential Manor already."

"Quistis is leading troops through the south gate of Esthar today to try and find a way through the city to the manor. She and her troops will bolster the defenses already in place there--"

"And _die_, Leonhart." he snarled, crossing his arms over his chest. It was no wonder Seifer had terrorized students as the head of the disciplinary committee, Squall thought, studying him now. He wasn't huge in the sense of Raijin's width, but he carried muscle well on his 6' 2" frame, and he had a certain atmosphere about him that promised excruciating pain. It wasn't an empty threat, and it raged in his eyes now as he stared down Garden's commander. "I'm not letting you send her on some fucking suicide mission."

"Quistis follows her orders." Squall replied coldly. "Maybe you should do the same. We can't let Galbadia continue to occupy Esthar."

Seifer snorted loudly. "Yeah. Years of SeeD training, three failed SeeD tests because I 'deviated from the original mission,' thousands of Quistis' boring lectures couldn't make me obedient, but your inspiring speech is going to turn that all around right now."

"Maybe Ultimicea should have possessed me instead of Rinoa if I wanted you to obey me." Squall replied, the ice in his voice palpable enough to strike with a hammer.

Seifer's eyes narrowed, and a thousand layers of colored contact lenses couldn't have masked the animal rage that blazed inside them now. "I'm going to make you fucking _eat _Lionheart--"

He took a step forward, and the aforementioned gun blade swept out to meet him, its point finding the vulnerable hollow of his throat. Seifer froze, and for one tense moment that stretched like an eternity between them, Squall thought the bigger man was going to lunge anyway.

His hand tightened on Lionheart, but it was a sweaty, nervous grip, and not one he was accustomed to clenching the gun blade in. His eyes spoke silent, ruthless pledges to Seifer's--but they were empty promises, like the ones Rinoa had whispered sometimes at night about never leaving him. If Seifer knocked aside Lionheart and attacked, Squall could beat him, break his bones, claw up that scarred forehead that so closely matched his own--but he couldn't kill him.

In the end, Seifer was only doing what Squall would have gladly done a thousand times over--he was protecting the woman he loved. Ultimicea had stolen that option from Squall, because to save Rinoa meant preserving evil, and as much as he loved her, he just couldn't do that. She was gone now, even though sometimes the feeling of calm and gentleness that was undeniably _her _resonated so thickly in his soul that he just couldn't bring himself to believe he would never kiss her smiling lips again.

Abruptly, his chest started to hurt. It was a sensation he was familiar with by now, a crushing fist hammer to the heart that made him want to die.

He held Lionheart steadily at Seifer's throat, pretending his world wasn't slowly ending around him, day by unbearable day.

Finally, the ex-knight scowled and relaxed his coiled-spring muscles slightly, although he didn't back away. That would have been too close to surrendering, and despite himself, Squall smiled, very faintly. He didn't think Seifer noticed.

Lionheart edged downward, kissing the floor with a faint squeal.

"Put me in charge." Seifer demanded. "I'll take them into Esthar."

Squall shook his head. "No. You're not even SeeD, and you're a new student. Quistis is well-known and respected. Soldiers will obey her; they won't respect you the same way."

"You want to bet on that?"

"You're not the school bully slapping infractions on people in the secret area after curfew anymore. It's different in the field."

"I _know _that, dammit." he snapped, frustration bleeding through into Seifer's words. "Fuck, Leonheart--isn't Quistis your friend? You want to send her to her death?"

"I don't believe Quistis is doomed just because I'm sending her into the middle of everything. I have faith in her skills."

"Being skilled doesn't keep you alive forever."

Squall smoothed his fingertips over his scar. "I know." His voice was almost a sigh. "She wants to go, Seifer. She actually volunteered. She wants to make sure Laguna gets out safely if they can't force back the Galbadian front lines."

Seifer's face bleached out, and then color exploded back into it with the sudden raging intensity and hue of a forest fire. He looked like he wanted to kill the nearest person he could get his hands on, and considering that Squall was the only other person within immediate grasp, it made him a bit wary. He wondered if maybe he should pick up where he had left off with Lionheart.

"She _volunteered_?" The sharpness of his tone had darkened, and hardened into a deadly point that stabbed at Squall's ears. He looked more frightening than Squall had ever seen him before--even as Ultimicea's lap dog, with the parade's shimmering illumination snagging in his hair and not quite outshining the madness in his eyes.

Seifer spun, the trench coat he wore over Garden's uniform--it was the first time he'd ever donned it, and he wore it now only because it told his allies exactly which side he was on--flaring out around him. "Keep a seat open on the Ragnarok for me." he spat furiously over one shoulder.

_I assumed as much. _Squall thought, flicking his bangs from his eyes. "By the way--Quistis is waiting for you. On the balcony on the 2nd floor, past the classrooms. She thought you might want to talk to her."

As Seifer stormed out without another word, Squall finally seated himself once more, staring emptily into the pencil jar holding Rinoa's cutsey pink offerings. Did he really want Quistis in the heart of Esthar, where the fighting was bloodiest right now? No, but this was war, and his friends were soldiers. Quistis wanted to be out on the front lines, sacrificing her life to keep those she loved safe. Seifer would have to accept that eventually.

A few tendrils of breeze from the ocean glittering diamond-bright under the floating bulk of Garden coiled beneath Quistis' jacket, and she shivered. Above, the sun leaned heavily against frothy cloud banks, whipped cream formations that gave the whole scene a picturesque sensation. She smelled salt in the strands of wind that trickled into her nostrils, and in the distance a few gulls cried out random greetings to one another.

They were stationed somewhere off the coast of Centra, out in the middle of the sea, where they'd flown off the radar after the visit from Seifer's false brother. It was the compromise she, Seifer and Squall had reached after he'd demanded that she be whisked out of Garden to keep her out of Ultimicea's claws, because Quistis had refused to leave her home. She was done with running; the last time she'd lived as a fugitive, Matron had died, and she'd very nearly lost Seifer as well.

Why the sorceress had formed a sudden interest in her, she didn't know. Frankly, Quistis had more important things to worry over at the moment.

She could hear one of those concerns approaching right now, his footsteps foreboding and thundering even on the carpet that attempted to muffle them. He blew through the door a few seconds later, almost ripping the heavy steel right off its hinges as he stomped out onto the deck, his voice like acid-coated nails through her ears.

"You _volunteered_? Are you out of your fucking _mind_?"

Quistis steeled herself for his anger, and turned to face him, lifting her chin.

"_No_." Seifer hollered, his face redder than she'd ever seen it. He was well and truly pissed this time, not just irritated, and he'd never aimed so much wrath in her direction before. Contempt and disruption had been his weapons of choice, not this vein-throbbing rage that burned like a nuclear holocaust in his arteries and his glowing cheeks.

She captured the fleeting serenity the soft ocean waves and the cooing birds had lent her, and trapped it close to her heart. "No?"

"You're not going!" he snapped, stalking right up to her and seizing her by both arms, his face right in hers, his eyes impaling her. She felt the strands of her tranquility begin to slip through her fingers. "Are you stupid? You're really fucking telling me you're going to go right through the middle of Esthar to get to the Presidential Manor? They'll fucking kill you all before you even get twenty feet into the south entrance. Are you fucking stupid, Quistis? Are you?" He shook her a little to emphasize his point, and she found herself momentarily wondering how Ultimicea had harnessed so much raw power and bound it to herself. How much power did it take, to steal this man's iron will and bend his stubborness like a flimsy tree branch snapped over a knee?

"Seifer, calm down." Quistis said quietly.

"No!" he yelled, ripping his hands off her and swinging around, one clenched knuckled fist whistling outward in a deadly ark to ring jarringly off the railing she leaned against. She watched the skin split, watched it fracture into bleeding little cracks as he broke out in a new tirade of swearing, this spewed away from her and somewhere in the ocean's general direction, as though it too had personally offended him.

"Stop it, Seifer. Calm down." she said again, injecting authority into the command. "Let me look at your hand."

He tore it out of her gentle fingers, slamming it down on the railing again. "Don't touch me! What the hell are you thinking? Was this thing Leonheart's idea? Did Chicken Wuss give you fucking puppy dog eyes or something?"

"No."

"Then why the hell would you agree to this? It's fucking _suicide_."

"Because I wanted to." she replied, keeping her tone low and calm, as though she were soothing a wounded animal. "President Loire is a good man, Seifer. The Galbadians will kill him if they make it all the way to the manor. And if Galbadia takes complete control of Esthar and gets hold of its technology, it could be catastrophic in Ultimicea's hands."

"I've been in Esthar for a couple of months now; you're not getting through to the manor. Esthar was theirs a long time ago."

She reached up, and laid a soft hand along his clenched jaw line. "I still have to try, Seifer. Squall's already lost Rinoa. He shouldn't have to lose his father, too."

"It always comes down to Leonhart for you, doesn't it?" he grumbled beneath his breath, eyes hooded.

Her brow furrowed. "What?"

"Never mind." Seifer spat out, turning toward the ocean and blowing out a frustrated breath. He slumped across the railing, his spine folding like the abruptly snapped mast of a ship. She could see defeat in the hunched anger of his posture, and it saddened her even though it meant she had won.

Quistis stood next to him in silence for a long time, just studying the glitter of sunlight off foam-capped waves, watching Garden's reflection ripple into distorted reverse and then slowly piece itself back together again in the mirror surface of the sea. "Do we have to fight before I leave?" she asked at last, sneaking a tentative glance at his scowling profile.

He didn't answer.

It was a strange thing, she thought, that the act of slowly unpeeling her fingers from the railing and circling around behind him to timidly press her cheek against his back and hug his waist with her arms stirred more butterflies in her stomach than the roaring death of battle. He stiffened, and she almost pulled away, but then she heard him sigh, and one of his hands reluctantly slithered off the rail to cup her clasped fingers.

"I'm a soldier, Seifer. This is what I do. You should know that better than anyone; you're one too."

_No I'm not. _he thought, looking down at her delicate white knuckles and picturing them stained with her own blood. _Soldiers follow orders and get themselves killed because some idiot in charge told them to. _

If he'd been a less proud man, he'd have fallen to his knees right then and begged her not to leave the safety of Garden, to let others take care of the bleeding and the dying. Arrogant as he was, he considered it for one brief moment. But that would do nothing, except maybe give her a heart attack; he'd always marveled that someone existed who was just as stubborn as he.

He made his voice artic cold. "Fine. Go to Esthar. Get killed. Whatever."

She wanted to make a remark about his last word being Squall's line, but the knot in her throat tightened far too much for her to speak as he pulled away from her and walked back into Garden, the door slamming loudly behind him.

* * *

He was right on time to their transportation, and though he sat several seats behind her, Quistis could feel his presence burning her like UV rays on already sunburned skin.

When they smashed into Galbadia's waiting forces, he fought like a wild animal next to her, tearing men apart in a radius of furious violence echoed all around them as the fighting intensified.

Above them, the moon bled pearly radiance into the midnight sky.

She tasted blood on her lips as they battered themselves against Galbadian men and women, struggling frantically for that one opening that might allow a few of them to slip through into the city, her whip splitting dark sky and flesh alike as Garden's soldiers advanced.

Seifer pulled a pin on one of his grenades and hurled it in a powerful overhand throw into a knot of enemies; Quistis dodged flying body parts as it exploded, the boom of Exeter shattering her right ear.

"Fira!" someone yelled to her left, and it was not an annoucement, but a warning; she ducked just as a wall of flames surged over her head, catching two unfortunate cadets full on and burning their faces down to melted bone.

She cast cure on a fallen comrade, then vaulted a young woman's body as Seifer took off running for a break in the crush of bodies blocking their way. Behind her, a blood-spattered Irvine followed on their heels, clutching his rifle tightly as he ran, swinging the stock a few times to bash aside the random assailant that sprang from the shadows. "There's a clear spot up ahead!" he screamed, motioning to Zell and an unknown SeeD, who joined their charge as well; Seifer crashed headlong into the next wave of soldiers, and Quistis' heart stopped for a moment as he disappeared in the roiling knot that was Esthar's battleground.

The broken windows of a nearby building crunched beneath her boots. She spear-handed a man in the throat, smashing his larynx and dropping him in a gurgling heap at her feet. Seifer's hair flashed sunlight-bright ahead of her, and she could breathe again, a second blonde glint joining him a moment later as Zell punched and kicked his way into the action. They formed a deadly team, Zell fighting bare-handed as usual and Seifer alternating between his various weapons and his own scraped knuckles, breaking bone and snapping necks with a ferocity that made Quistis glad he was on their side once again.

He looked vicious, smeared in the bloody paint of his enemies, teeth bared in a predator's grimace of anger.

"Fall back!" Quistis ordered several cadets. "Give them magical support!" she shouted, casting Protect on both men as around her ribbons of lightning snagged enemy soldiers in their fatal embrace with the accompanying boom of thunder, and rose blossoms of various fire spells circled Zell and Seifer like a thousand suns. Beside her, Irvine sighted down Exeter and drilled a bullet between the eyes of a man charging Seifer from the left.

Miraculously enough, they seemed to be pushing their way through, slowly but inexorably. It was a brutal struggle, but Garden's SeeDs gradually began to force their way inside the cracks in Galbadia's lines, into the heart of the city and the besieged manor. They bled and burned and died on Esthar's glass roads, crashing through building fronts, destroying valuable technology with the carelessness of men who will die if they pay attention to anything but blood and death and the next swing of an opponent's blade.

He was still out front, they both were, and that knowledge compressed Quistis' heart into a miniscule little cube that pumped her blood out sluggishly. The condensed wormhole of her throat burned with each inhalation, and somewhere in the back of her mind she kept picturing both of their deaths, over and over again.

But Zell and Seifer pressed on as she called out battle formations behind them, keeping everything as tightly in check as she could in the midst of so much chaos. Out of the corner of her left eye, Quistis saw someone summon Ifrit, and the horned beast blasted a path of destruction through Galbadia's forces, creating another opening for the two blonde men.

She tried not to allow herself to hope as the battle raged on--but little pieces of the tightly restrained emotion broke free anyway, shards of optimism slicing through her heart and embedding themselves like bullets. She could see the manor ahead--just its uppermost spires, but still, there it was, trapping rays of moonlight inside its shiny surface and then turning them back out over the battle grounds. The lances of illumination dropped like lightning bolts, flaring brilliantly for a moment where they struck the city, and then winking out of existence.

Quistis cast a thunder spell into the melee as Exeter boomed beside her again.

Then she saw Zell drop, and her world came crashing down around her. Time ground to a stuttering halt, jerking like the last faltering attempts of a corpse climbing from its grave.

"Zell!" Irvine hollered beside her, and she heard true anguish in the man's voice as those shards of optimism warped into something darker, and thrust poison into her heart. He hurtled forward like he meant to place himself right in the center of that death circle ringing both men now, and, feeling sick, Quistis put out an arm to stop him.

But he barreled right through it, and with his next scream something else exited as well, Quetzalcoatl bursting into sparking flight ahead of Irvine.

She cast frantically, throwing everything she could think of into the Galbadians surrounding Zell and Seifer as the Guardian Force swooped down on them and snatched a woman in his crackling talons, lifting the screaming girl several feet above the city before opening his claws abruptly around her.

Her shriek lasted far too long, it seemed to Quistis. When she finally struck the road just a few feet away with the splinter of crunching bones, an entire lifetime had passed. In the skies overhead, Quetzalcoatl extending his humming wings and released a stream of blue-tongued lightning that dropped in a net of live wires over a knot of enemy soldiers; their burning flesh singed Quistis' olfactory senses.

She saw the wall of clashing bodies around the two blonde men give way a little as Quetzalcoatl thinned them out, two more falling victim in rapid succession to Irvine's sharpshooting skills. He reached a body lying prone and far too still beside Seifer and dropped to his knees beside it, Exeter still gripped in one shaking hand.

Quistis burst into a sprint as Irvine's GF made short work of the men standing in her way, her heart thudding somewhere near her boots as she recognized Zell's tattooed face, cheek down in a puddle of blood.

"Come on, man. Dincht! You little shit, don't do this to me! Don't do this to me, man!" They were heartfelt pleas, full of a desperation that seized Quistis' heart in needle-sharp teeth and tore it right down the center. Irvine's ponytail had come undone long ago, and his chestnut hair streamed in a clumped, bloody banner over his shoulders now as he cradled Zell in his arms.

A trickle of red leaked from her friend's mouth, too-bright and real and horribly…final somehow.

She crouched next to Irvine, laying her whip across her lap and gripping the distraught cowboy by the arm. "I have a few Curaga--calm down, Irvine. I'll help him."

"I've been administering Curaga, dammit! It's not working! Oh shit--I don't think he's breathing…Dincht, come on man, please!"

Quistis looked up helplessly, and Seifer met her gaze. She looked away before the film over her eyes could shatter into something more. "Irvine." she said very quietly, her voice as gentle as she'd ever made it. "If he's gone, there's nothing we can do. We need to keep going." The words killed her inside, but she said them anyway, because she had led this campaign into Esthar, and she intended to finish it.

"No." Irvine protested, shaking his head, the red-coated strands of his mane flaring out around him. The word broke as he said it, and he hiccupped down a sob as Quistis moved her hand to his shoulder.

Zell's motionless chest gave a sudden, erratic lurch--and then stopped as Irvine began mumbling "No, no, dammit…come on man, come on, stay with me," again.

Quistis' nails tightened into the flesh beneath his jacket, and she struggled to keep herself from unraveling.

Then a sudden wash of pale blue light dropped from above, like some descending angel, hitting Zell square in the chest. He wheezed another breath, his mouth snapping open around the gasping breath, and for a heart-stopping moment Quistis thought that was it again. Then another hissing sigh whistled from his lips and nostrils, and his chest rose and fell--and then rose and fell again, halting at first, then with more regularity.

"There you go, Dincht you little shit. Come on man, keep breathing."

She looked up into Seifer's impassive face, her gaze traveling down to the hand he still held extended slightly out. "That was my last Curaga. You guys'll have to handle it from here." he told her, and then turned to make his way forward, toward the distant peak of Laguna's home.

* * *

It took another two brutal, grueling hours to reach the manor, and when they did Quistis saw with a sinking heart that they'd arrived too late, just as Seifer had predicted. Only a few scattered skirmishes still raged here and there, but the manor itself lay in flames and crumpled rubble. One entire side of it had collapsed in on itself, holding the half-buried corpses of the president's aids and personal bodyguards.

Above, the moon continued to leak its angel feather light, throwing streamers of it down over the building in lustrous ribbons that highlighted the bloody tear of dead flesh and the liquefied fusion of melted steel and glass. The glow stroked fingers of white gold over Seifer's cut and dirty face, a stranger to her with its smooth forehead and blue eyes.

But the scowl was entirely his, and he streaked black soot across that unmarked forehead as he lifted an arm to rub the sweat from his face.

Quistis sank to the street, tucking her heels beneath her as she crouched, bitterness congealing in the pit of her stomach and burrowing its way into her intestines. She could feel it chewing an astringent path along her insides, nipping here, devouring there, until she'd been scoured clean and there was simply nothing left.

Seifer said nothing as he squatted down next to her. She watched his eyes tilt skyward, toward the distant whine of a warship streaking by overhead, its scream echoing in her ears for a long, long time while they sat there watching the manor burn.


	20. Chapter 19

**Chapter Nineteen**

Sewers

Deling City

Three months and five days after the siege against Esthar began, Galbadia slaughtered its way through the city and into President Loire's home. The gutted shell of it interred those unfortunates who had served, fought and died for Esthar's endearing leader--black-suited bodyguards and cabinet members half-shredded by the artillery of Ultimicea's forces, teenaged SeeDs wearing their china doll death stares--but not President Loire himself.

Thanks to Ultimicea, Laguna was scheduled for a public execution today by her hand, and Seifer found himself slogging through glacial, disgusting liquid beside his one-time enemy, trying to control his shivering and cursing under his breath while the foul water nibbled sharply at his toes. The bitch had a flair for the dramatic, he had to give her that.

He just wished that flair didn't have to involve him. But if he hadn't accompanied Squall on this asinine mission to rescue his father, Quistis would have--and like hell he was delivering her directly into the arms of the enemy that way.

Garden's commander looked tensely prepared, lips tight around a grimacing mouth that lent his youthful face a haggard maturity more befitting of a man twice his age. He seemed impervious to the dank air bleeding like chilly sweat from the walls surrounding them--but then again, any outside temperature must feel far more docile than the solid-frozen ice block of his heart. A confrontation with his nearly-estranged father and his ex-girlfriend, who wore the same body but danced on the strings of another puppet master now; it was going to be a busy day for Squall.

Seifer tripped over a half-digested rat, spit up from the gullet of a far larger predator, and said "Fuck!" The profanity bounced off the hollow tube of the tunnel they followed, skipping back and forth from side to side like a playful child. He glanced at his companion out of the corner of one eye, but the stone-faced young man didn't even twitch. He carried Lionheart drawn and dangling down his right side, and that was what he focused on as he walked; the arctic smolder of steel through his glove, the deadweight sag that pulled his shoulder, the whining hum of honed blade where it dragged along concrete.

He couldn't think about anything else. Not his father, not that thing dressed in Rinoa's stolen face, not the jagged knife blade of pain trying to stab its way into that block of ice he called a heart.

"This should bring us out into a back entrance for the tower where she's keeping him." Squall explained blandly, keeping his voice carefully neutral. He'd had a lot of practice at doing so; only Rinoa had really elicited much beyond that mumbled monotone, and she was gone now.

Hyne. Why did it still hurt, thinking about that? Hadn't he had enough time to get used to the idea now?

"Been here before, Pube…" Seifer trailed off, for the first time in his entire life considering that this might not be the time to throw around insults.

But Squall didn't seem to notice. "This is where she…tried to kill Rinoa. A long time ago, before the parade."

Seifer fell quiet, thinking about his role in that parade. Strange how a couple of years could turn something that seemed so irreversible completely around; rivals first, then outright enemies, and now, reluctant allies.

He studied Squall out of the corner of his eye, the dark bangs climbing their way into the blue stone of determined eyes, the faint pink line of scar tissue, the clenched-tight jaw line. Leonheart was fucking cold, and steady as a damn rock, he'd give him that.

On the outside, at least. Inside, Squall was the same chaotic storm eye that strangled Seifer's chest every time Quistis waded into the front lines of battle, every time battle-weary soldiers returned to Garden and she wasn't with them, every time he watched her wash blood from her hands and her gaunt, drained face. Seifer was perceptive enough to judge that much at least. He loosened Hyperion--which someone had anonymously salvaged from the wreckage of the Sorceress Memorial; he suspected Quistis, but she wasn't saying anything--and held it in the same gloved grip that Squall grasped Lionheart in. He'd insisted on bringing the weapon along--if rescuing Laguna led to a showdown with Ultimicea, which it more than likely would, he wanted every advantage possible. Hyperion gave him that edge, and despite Quistis' arguments, he didn't think anyone was likely to distinguish the weapon from other gun blades without a close look at it. And anyway, they hadn't exactly just stormed into the city. Stealth was the name of the game today, hence the reason for only two of them as opposed to an entire team. Quistis, Selphie, Irvine, and even an injured Zell had all vehemently offered to accompany their friend, who'd originally planned to go the whole thing alone.

In the end, he'd agreed to take just one other person, because two would go more easily unnoticed than five, and Seifer had bullied his way to that coveted position. He'd done it mostly to keep Quistis out of the whole mess, but a deep-down part of him thought that maybe he'd wanted to go for his own reasons too.

He wasn't quite sure what those reasons were yet, and he didn't have time to ponder them.

Squall veered off to the left, toward a set of rusty steps arrowing upward to the dark, slimy circle of a manhole cover. He didn't sheathe Lionheart, but climbed the rungs one-handed, just a little awkwardly, then set his shoulder to the heavy steel slab. He shoved once, twice, and then with a high-pitched shriek of complaint, the lid tilted and slid to one side, introducing a crack of peach twilight.

Seifer followed quickly, scrambling his way nimbly to the top as Squall disappeared.

"Fuck--Deling's air pollution is starting to smell really good all of a sudden." he said, popping his head up out of the sewers and wrinkling his nose. This was the _last _fucking time he was going anywhere near a cesspit like that, even for Quistis.

Squall helped him drag the cover back into place. Seifer bent down to pick up Hyperion and gave the weapon a few practice swings, the blade whispering sharp promises through the sunset air.

Lionheart pointed out a jumble of crates that would assist them onto the ledge of a nearby building, and from there a ladder that reached the peak of their final destination. Seifer nodded acknowledgement and followed Squall onto the first stack, blood thrumming electrically in his veins.

It was exactly as he remembered it. The same storage boxes, holding Hyne only knew what, the same sensation of tight-banded dread squeezing his chest down to a scrawny tree branch barely wide enough for his lungs to inflate. The same quiet metallic _ping _of his boots on metal steps, the same cotton-wisp brush of that gauzy veil of a curtain.

Squall brushed the hanging aside, left with the eerie impression of cobwebs dragged over his skull, and crept inside.

He didn't see Ultimicea or his father, but he hadn't really thought to find them in this first room. The sorceress liked flamboyance, attention; she'd kill Laguna where everyone could watch, where the sunset could hemorrhage its pink-violet death across his face.

Behind him, Seifer's boots sighed a furtive path across the carpeted floor. He saw the flash of Hyperion out of the corner of his eye, and for one fleeting moment, he was glad it was Seifer at his side. Not because he liked the man--they weren't exactly friends by any stretch of the imagination-- but because out of any of them, it was Seifer who wouldn't hesitate, who would strike that killing blow straight through the precious skull of Rinoa Heartilly if that's what it took.

The thought made Squall sick, but he knew that was the kind of clinical detachment he needed right now.

He tip-toed past the concealed floor hatch he and Irvine had descended through so long ago, and emerged out onto the balcony.

Laguna's hair flowed down around his shoulders, unbound and blowing in the breeze that rippled his torn shirt front, split around a still well-muscled chest. A cut above his left eye streamed blood, bisecting the eyebrow and coating his eyelid with the sticky red glaze. But beyond that, a few other minor lacerations and general disheveled appearance, he seemed relatively all right. He looked pale, but more resigned than frightened, and Squall wondered if that was how he looked now.

Positioned in front of Esthar's restrained president, a video camera sat on its aluminum tri-pod, ready to record the whole scene for posterity's sake.

Seifer walked over to it as Squall sliced neatly through the ropes knotting Laguna to one of the balcony's pillars, and sent the entire thing crashing to the ground with one good thrust of the foot.

"Squall! Dammit, you shouldn't be here--"

"It's ok." his son replied. He tried not to allow his voice to catch on the next words, but it did anyway. "Where is she?"

"I don't know, Squall, but she must be--"

Seifer gave him a hard shove back the way they'd come, cutting Laguna off mid-protest. "-holed up somewhere plotting our fucking demise, probably." he finished for the man. "So let's get the hell out of here before she comes back."

Squall, facing the balcony railing and staring out over it into the smear of tangerine and red that comprised the evening sky, pointed his finger. "Too late."

Seifer heard the shrill whistle blast of its heavy body plunging through the air first, and then the earthquake jolt of its landing, an arrival that shook the balcony's stone floor beneath him. The thing unfurled black raven wings that stretched twice as wide as he stood tall, smashing one feathered mass into Squall and cart wheeling him over the railing, where he drooped like dirty laundry, wheezing breath back into his body.

Lionheart plummeted downward, stiking concrete with the final ringing note of an orchestra bidding its last farewell. Seifer watched a few people scream and scatter in the streets below.

He grabbed Squall by the collar of his jacket and hauled him back onto his feet, shoving him toward a startled Laguna and waving them both toward the exit. "Go!"

Squall stumbled into his father's chest with the force of Seifer's push, holding himself tightly around the midsection.

And then the ex-knight turned to face his opponent, peeling his teeth back over the wolf's sneer that was Seifer's expression alone, swinging Hyperion in a gleaming little circle and beckoning with a gloved hand toward the monster. He never had quite let go of those old romantic dreams, even when Ultimicea finally let loose of him; battling some ferocious beast in a palace tower with dusk painting the scene into its watercolor clouds was his knight's dream.

He charged to meet it, his blood singing its euphoria.

* * *

Infirmary

Balamb Garden

Zell's face formed the very picture of strained concentration; pinched brow, squinted eyes, tongue tucked into one corner of the mouth and peeking slightly out through his lips. He tapped one finger in a staccato rhythm against his chin, over and over again until it was the only thing Quistis could hear. Sitting next to her, Bria hummed an unintelligible noise beneath her breath.

He set a card down.

Irvine tilted his hat up. "You lose."

"Aww, man! That's the fourth time in a row, dammit!" Zell whined, flicking his hand out as though he intended to throw his last card in disgust--forgetting that he'd just put his last card into the game, and therefore forfeited it to Irvine.

"I told you not to put it there." Bria told him, gathering a few pieces of cardboard that had slipped off her boyfriend's bed and handing them to the smug cowboy.

"You did not!"

"Yeah, I did. I gave you the sign, Zell."

"She did; I heard it." Irvine agreed.

"What sign? There was no sign!"

Quistis smiled faintly, glancing at her watch. Triple Triad had kept her mind partially distracted for a while, but after three straight hours it was beginning to wear a bit thin. She couldn't help but wonder where Squall and Seifer were at this very moment while she and her friends wasted time playing games--had Ultimicea strung them up beside Laguna like displayed meat, their intestines strung out in clothes line strings of pulsing rope for all the world to see?

_I should have gone, no matter what Seifer said. _she thought, rubbing her face tiredly. Why had she let him win that particular battle of wills? She could have prevailed, if she'd kept pushing.

But remembering the look on his face, Quistis reluctantly conceded that her cool teacher's logic hadn't even touched the blazing inferno of his stubborness. Sending Quistis right into the lion's mouth was a subject he hadn't budged on, and she was beginning to regret now some of the words they'd exchanged. Why did it always come down to butting heads for them? Why couldn't she just swoon prettily into his arms and kiss him good-bye the way a normal woman probably would have?

She scowled. Because she wasn't normal, and just the thought of melting like some romance novel heroine into the embrace of her 'hero' felt unnatural, like touching molding food.

"Quistis? HEY QUISTIS!"

She jolted back to awareness with Zell's shout ringing painfully loud in her ears. "What?"

"Did you hear the sign? Or am I just crazy?"

"I'd go with that one, Dincht." Irvine offered brightly, rubbing his knuckles lightly across his friend's hair.

Zell scowled and shoved him away, crossing his arms over his chest. He sat mutely for a full three seconds--a long time for Zell--and then blurted out "Man, I hate this. I wish I could have gone, you know? I'm not hurt that bad; Squall shoulda' taken me."

"You punctured a lung and had your skull about cracked open just yesterday. Most people wouldn't even be sitting up yet."

"See? I'm a fast healer. I can fight."

"No, you're hopped up on a lot of drugs and about a ton of Curaga spells." Bria said.

"I think we can trust that guy--what's his name, Quistis, Devon something? I've seen the guy fight, Dincht. Squall will be ok with him watching his back." Irvine looked over at her, and the glint in his eyes flashed strangely, sharp-edged and vaguely suspicious.

"But he should have taken one of us-- he knows us better, and we're a team."

"Irvine's right, Zell." Quistis interjected quietly. "I'm sure they'll both be ok." It was the lie she kept telling herself, so she might as well repeat it to him as well.

Irvine stood up from his perch at Zell's left shoulder, arching his back into a cat's lithe stretch. "Ma'am." He tipped his hat in Bria's direction. "I do believe we oughta' be lettin' you get back to tending your patient. He's startin' to look a little fuzzy."

Quistis glanced over at the indignant martial artist, who despite his most vehement protests, was beginning to look a little woozy from the combination of medicine and magic suffusing his veins. Bria had injected something into his I.V. line about fifteen minutes ago--probably to make him sleep--and it seemed to be taking hold now.

"Guys, come on. I'm worried 'bout Squall." Zell yelled to their retreating backs, slurring his words a little. "Bria, how come I feel all silly? My toes are moving!"

Irvine snickered beside Quistis.

The infirmary's door closed on Bria's hushed murmuring, which Quistis couldn't quite make out. She turned out into the hallway--looking rather bleak and empty with most of its inhabitants deployed to various regions through the continent in defense against Balamb's continuing advances--intending to go her own way to brood quietly alone, until Irvine laid a gentle hand on her arm. "Quis."

She looked up at the soft note in his voice, reading the lines of concern etched around his beautiful eyes. Her heart unclenched a little. Irvine, for all his showy lady-killer charm, was a compassionate man underneath the swagger and the charisma. Long lashes framed the empathetic doe eyes that were almost too pretty for a man's face, and she could still feel little splinters from the shattering her heart had suffered while she watched him weeping over a dying Zell on Esthar's battlefield.

Her lips flared into a ghost smile; she wanted it to be a real one, but at the moment she just couldn't manage that. "Something on your mind?"

They started off together down the vacant corridor, his tall, lean frame dwarfing her as they walked in companionable silence for a little ways before he adjusted his hat and cleared his throat. "What's the story with this guy Squall ran off with?"

She felt her shoulders tighten slightly. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, who is he?"

"A SeeD cadet from Garden. A transfer from Trabia, I believe. I don't know very much about him." she replied carefully.

"Really?" Irvine's brow crinkled. "Quis, I ain't stupid. I spent my formative years perfecting the art of winin' and dinin' women, all right? I'd like to think I'm fairly perceptive in that kind of thing, and there's somethin' goin' on between the two of you."

Quistis forced her shoulders back down into their natural position, away from her ears. "Why would you say that?" She kept her gaze forward, praying the heat in her cheeks didn't show against her pale skin.

"Little glances between you guys. Not really conscious, I think. Just…like the looks Selphie gives me sometimes, when no one else is really paying attention. Heck, after a while I don't even realize when I'm doing it. It's just, kinda'…a closeness I guess is what I'm tryin' to say. And the way he scored a place at the side of Garden's commander for a mission that might end up being one of the most important throughout the whole war--if they confront Ultimicea, they could bring her down right now and end everything, Quis."

She wondered how the hot poker throbbing in her throat had jammed its way inside. "I know." The acknowledgement was just a frog's croak of breath, rough and snapped in half where it tripped out of her mouth.

"Zell was right. It should be one of us with Squall right now. Why is someone who's not even SeeD yet and pretty much a stranger with him now, when he needs someone he can trust?"

Quistis sieved a sigh between her teeth. Dammit. Irvine was too smart for his own good.

"So who is he really, Quis?"

She stopped in the middle of the hallway, looking down at her boot tops, brightly polished and reflecting her grim face back at her in the black and gold amalgamation that was the surface of her footwear and the overhead lights. "Irvine, I'm sorry, I can't…"

"You don't trust me?" he asked, sounding wounded. "How long have we been friends?"

"It isn't my secret to tell." Quistis protested weakly, sitting down hard on a nearby bench and knotting her hands together between her knees. If Irvine had begun to notice oddities here and there, then how long was it before someone else pieced the puzzle together? How long before someone came around asking too many questions? They couldn't keep up the ruse forever; she'd known that deep inside, but watching it begin to unravel before her still hurt.

He squatted in front of her, hands resting lightly on his knees, gaze open and earnest where it burned against hers. "Quis…" He dropped his voice, even though there was no one around to overhear. "It's Seifer, isn't it? Devon…he's really Seifer."

All the color leeched from her cheeks, and he knew he was right. "Don't panic, ok? Quis--come on, stop looking at me like that." He grabbed her hands and held them lightly, soothingly in his own. His fingers felt large and callused against her own, the hands of a working man and not the suave, well-bred demeanor he tended to project. "I've known something was off for a little while…jest started to piece things together. It makes sense."

"Irvine, I--"

"Don't worry, Quis--I can keep my mouth shut. Is it him?"

She nodded mutely, lips tightly compressed.

Irvine sat back on his heels, still holding her hands, and let out a low whistle. "So the execution was a fake. And he's been here at Garden ever since?"

"Not quite. He spent a while in FH. And then he came back." _For me. I'm putting him in danger, once again. _she thought miserably, but didn't say so aloud. She looked up at him, feeling slightly ashamed. "Irvine…I know Seifer isn't exactly well-loved among…well, anyone. Aren't you mad?"

"No, not really. I mean, I'm a little agitated you didn't think you could tell me--but I guess I kinda' can understand the need for secrecy and all. Almasy ain't my favorite person ever…he's pretty far down the list, actually, but I know he didn't deserve to die. Guy's just a Class A asshole, not evil. I know he didn't do the things he was 'executed' for. People shouldn'ta been so hot-headed. He was sort of Ultimicea's victim, just like a lot of other people. You'd think more people would have understood that. And if you trust him…then that's good enough for me."

A flare of warmth for her friend bombed Quistis' heart, and the smoking remains of it crowded her throat, singeing her eyes as he smiled gently up at her.

She felt her eyes brimming a little, and quickly blinked back any traces of moisture. "You don't know what a burden this has been, worrying someone would find out, worrying over…just worrying over him in general. He isn't the easiest man to try and sneak in under the radar of a suspicious, spiteful public, you know. Seifer isn't exactly…subtle, even when he's supposed to be someone else."

"He'll be all right, Quis." Irvine assured her, brushing his thumb across her knuckles. "If there's one thing I can say about Almasy, bastard just won't die."

Seifer pushed himself off the balcony's railing, scrambling to his feet and dodging another crashing wave of liquid that crested its way toward him, born on the invisible wings that were magic's transportation. The water spell blasted a chunk out of the railing, and he heard it crack like splitting bone far below him.

The ground under his feet shifted a little as Ultimicea's feathered minion took a shattering step forward, clawing up chunks of rock in its titanic predator's talons.

He sneered and cast Thunder at it.

The thing gave a shriek and reared back, chest arching, wings lengthening magnificently to either side. Vanishing sunlight snagged in its plumage, an oily rainbow-glitter across Seifer's pupils that momentarily blinded him.

The next spell caught him off guard, and plastered him back against the railing once more, dangerously close to the missing section. He swore and shook his head violently, shedding water in all directions, blinking through blurring little droplets as the creature struck with its beak. The curved face opened around the vampire fangs of a childhood monster, and Seifer snarled a vicious obscenity.

He couldn't quite dodge this next attack--he tried valiantly, but his foot slipped in a puddle that he hadn't noticed and one of his knees impacted hard against pavement, giving him only enough time to raise Hyperion in one last gleaming line of defense above him.

The creature's teeth glanced off the blade and scraped a shallow line down his right shoulder, just a glancing blow, but enough to tear clothing and incise the flesh below. "_Fuck_!" he screamed, because it had damn well _hurt_, and the impact burned on long after the monstrous face had pulled back, drooling a string of acid poison into the ragged lips of his wound.

He heard someone scream "Use thunder spells on it!" and a moment later, a fireball of sizzling blue crashed into the thing's chest, blowing a crater wide enough to expose the rib cage.

Seifer heard running feet, and took advantage of the spell's momentum to lunge back to his own feet, the charge carrying through into a stabbing thrust that rammed straight through it's throat. He buried Hyperion to the hilt, looking straight into the flame-glow intelligence of those eyes for a moment. Then it jerked its head back, screaming again, and, still attached to Hyperion's handle, Seifer flew with the whiplash of that gargantuan skull. He held on for dear life, every muscle in his body shrieking its strain, his right shoulder alight with hellfire warmth.

Fuck fuck _fuck_, that whole arm was on fire now, and at any moment he expected to watch it crumble into sooty ashes, scattered into flaking little pieces across the balcony.

Thundara smashed the monster right between its eyes, and Seifer watched that flame-glow flicker out and die.

It sagged forward abruptly, and Seifer yanked desperately on Hyperion, trying to get the blade loose before the monster collapsed totally and crushed him beneath it. With his feet still swinging above the ground he couldn't get the leverage he needed, so finally, with another barrage of swearing, he let go, landed hard, and turned the fall into a roll that brought him neatly back to his feet.

He turned around as Squall stepped up beside him, Lionheart gleaming molten silver before him. "Shit! Stupid thing is laying right on my gun blade."

"I've got a Float stocked." Laguna offered, and true to his word, a moment later the dead creature moved, rolling loose-limbed onto its side and exposing the protruding hilt of Hyperion.

Seifer yanked it free, then turned to face them. "The hell are you two doing back here?" he demanded, scowling. "I had everything taken care of."

"Squall wouldn't leave a friend behind." Laguna said, looking at his son with the faint flush of pride tinting his cheeks. There was so much love in the man's face a blind man probably could have spotted it, and it made Seifer want to scoff--but he didn't. Somewhere low down inside his gut, he felt a tiny rat-gnaw of pain, a leftover ache of the unloved orphan who is secretly jealous of loving families.

Leonhart glanced at him, and he barked a short laugh. _Friend? If the guy knew who I was…_

He shared a look with his former rival that was half irony, half quiet amusement.

"Come on, _friend_. Let's get the fuck out of here."

Squall nodded, and turned to his father. "Ultimicea knows we're here now; there will probably be soldiers waiting for us. We need some kind of disguise."

"This isn't going to be one of those stereotypical 'let's beat up the guards and steal their uniforms,' is it?" Seifer griped. "That's overdone."

Squall's brow darkened. "You have a better idea?"

"No." Seifer admitted. "I just know that idea is crap."

"Why?" Squall bristled, face cold and tight. Seifer wondered whether it was just the general stress of the situation, or if poor little Puberty Boy didn't like being undermined in front of his father. He resisted the urge to exploit the latter, because they had far more important things to worry about than an opportunity to bully Squall.

"Because I don't think Ultimicea's sending her soldiers after us. She'll know who's here, and she'll come pay us a visit herself." After all, tormenting the lover of Rinoa Heartilly and Seifer Almasy in one go was far too seductive a temptation for her to pass up. Seifer knew the woman, far more intimately than he wanted to; she'd let them get far enough to begin tentatively hoping that they'd actually escaped, and then she'd just flicker into existence before them, like some sputtering hologram with Rinoa's pretty smile pasted under her cold death gaze.

"Then we should split up." Squall said, and Seifer watched his jaw flex. "Even she can't be in two places at the same time. I'll draw her away while you two escape."

Laguna paled. "Squall, I don't think that's--"

Seifer saw the man's knees buckle first, a slow motion crumple of the leg joints that held him transfixed for one long, long moment where the world seemed to rotate to a jarring halt around him. He noticed the jagged spear of ice through the body of Squall's father next, and then the horrible wailing scream of Leonheart: "_Dad_!"

Lionheart echoed against stone, ringing and final.

Seifer watched it bounce, wobbling with the metallic screech of an out of control teeter-totter, flashing diamond-bright slivers of the glowing sunset into his eyes while somewhere in the background, Squall collapsed under Laguna's sagging weight, the bleeding man cradled in his arms.

Ultimicea smiled at him with Rinoa's lips, but those sinister dark things beneath her eyebrows weren't her eyes.

Seifer lifted his gunblade.

She turned to Squall, and those icy coal lumps crystallized into Rinoa's sweet, trusting gaze, and she asked in his fiancé's voice: "Does this look familiar, Squall?"

Dying in his son's arms, Laguna tried to persuade him to leave. Seifer could hear the hushed, gurgled murmur of conversation, but it was the agony on Squall's face that summarized the whole moment for him.

He looked like Seifer felt, every time Quistis disappeared into the clash of battle, every time he wasn't sure she'd arrived safely home--like some clawed appendage had reached into his chest and ripped his heart out, leaving a massive, sucking wound behind that dragged his aching lungs and everything else into that gravity well of pain.

It was an agony that sparked livid rage inside Seifer's chest. He didn't know why, but a small part of him hated Ulticimea in that moment--not for what she'd done to him, or even for trying to get her hands on Quistis, but because she was using the visage of the woman Squall loved to kill his father. The part of Seifer that didn't particularly like Squall but secretly respected him cringed, and angrily he thought _Haven't you done enough to him, bitch? _

He charged, without really planning to or knowing exactly why he did it.

The lunge surprised the sorceress as well as him. She flinched back as Hyperion swiped a deadly attack only an inch in front of where her face had been a second earlier, and the doe gaze iced back into Ultimicea's ugly sneer.

Then Seifer grabbed the front of her dress, winding his hand deep into the collar, and cast Fira with the fingers clutched in a sweaty death grip around Hyperion.

The spell left a streak of ashy black down the blade's length as it exploded from his fingertips, striking the ground between them in a booming detonation that frayed the stone underneath into a giant crater. The blast knocked him backward, and he just barely hung onto his weapon as Ultimicea's scream tore his ears, the remaining floor not blown away by Seifer's attack crumbling under her feet. He felt himself sliding with her as fragments of marble plummeted in a cutting rainstorm onto the streets below, and the brief triumph inside his chest froze over into panic.

Strong fingers clamped around his wrist as he fell, and his shoulder--the injured one, of course--jerked painfully.

He screamed. He hadn't meant to, but that sword thrust of fire through the damaged muscle dragged it out of him.

Seifer squinted up through tearing eyes to see Squall crouched above him, face contorted with strain, his hair whipped into a dark corona around his head by the wind.

But her grip on his ankle was stronger, and he felt Squall's perspiring hand sliding against him as she pulled him down. "Get off me, bitch!" Seifer yelled hoarsely, slamming his free boot into the top of her skull.

"Hold on!" Squall screamed over the sudden tornado wind noise of the spell Ultimicea threw at Seifer.

The storm blast caught him in its unrelenting teeth, and he felt Squall's hand peel from his wrist, finger by heart-thumping finger, the loss of each one driving the sword from his shoulder into his throat.

He saw Squall's mouth bow open around a shout he couldn't hear, and Seifer knew they had lost.

They fell together through the shrieking funnel of her magic.

Quistis couldn't say exactly what had brought her back to her classroom, during the dinner hour no less when she should have been trying to force down a few bites of food, if for no other purpose than putting a little something in her stomach.

Instead she found herself sitting alone behind her desk, with only the ticking clock for companionship while she read through some of his old test papers.

**1. What is the maximum number of spells a cadet may stock before he reaches SeeD status? **_Who the hell cares? I'm good enough to run out of spells and still not get into trouble. _

**2. Please diagram the proper position for a a basic offense against three enemy soldiers if you are outnumbered by 1. **_Blah, blah. Boring, Instructor. I'd just kill all three of them by myself. _

**3. If your GF is defeated in battle, on average, how long does it take to call up another one? **_Your favorite student doesn't need GF's, Instructor. _

They were arrogant answers, completely unshakable in his faith for himself. They made her smile a little now, though when he had first smugly turned it in, she'd tossed the page down in frustration and then covered its margins in corrective red ink. He'd received detention for that, if she recalled correctly, and bitched about it the entire time, his feet propped on his desk and his hands behind his head, his glower carving her like a sythe. Eventually he'd become bored with just griping, and had attempted to shake her by hitting on her in various lewd ways, until she'd finally thrown her book at his head and he'd fallen out of his chair laughing.

Thinking about him now, Quistis buried her face in her hands. How much had changed, since he'd been just another student in her class--a noisy, disruptive student with an alarming penchant for back talking, but in the end just one more face in the sea of pupils surrounding Squall. In those days, Garden's stoic, blue-eyed commander was her main concern, the puzzle piece that didn't quite fit into Quistis' neatly ordered world because its enigmatic surface had been a true mystery to her. Seifer had been too brash, too loudly obvious beside the closed book that was Squall Leonheart. She hadn't given him the attention she should have--maybe with a bit more direction, she could have helped him avoid the whole disaster with Ultimicea altogether…but no. She'd ventured down that line of thinking many times before, and it never brought her anything but disappointment and an empty sadness at the thought of the man he might have been.

Knowing him better now, Quistis wondered if maybe he wasn't as good a man as any--just better at hiding it. She knew that a part of Seifer--beneath his pride and his self-love--hated himself for the things he'd done under Ultimicea's control. And she thought that in his own unconscious way, he might be trying to make up for them. Saving first Bria and then Zell in recent battles were probably not the actions of the old Seifer--or maybe they were, and he'd just always been a better man than she realized. It had always been hard to see past that bullying exterior, especially when she was far more concerned with the piece of hair that skittered its uncertain way in front of Squall's piercing granite blue eyes.

_Seifer…_

Quistis sighed, rubbing her eyes. Loving him was the hardest thing she'd ever done; more difficult even than achieving SeeD rank or passing her Instructor's exam, a test so grueling few people succeeded, and sometimes she wondered whether she should really bother. But love wasn't really a conscious choice, and she was beginning to understand that more and more. She could keep him at arms length as long as she wanted, but it didn't cool her feelings for him, and it didn't banish the dragon's nest of fear that coiled in her stomach as she thought of his ongoing adventure in Deling City.

She was unaccustomed to fear, and losing him scared her so badly she felt like she'd swallowed the dying embers of a fire. It at least explained why she'd always worked so hard to evict terror and replace it with the frigid numbness that earned her the nickname of Ice Queen. Fear, quite frankly, sucked.

Quistis stood on slightly shaky legs and walked over to the window, its polished surface capturing the firefly glow of red and gold between layers of glass. Its pane burned her warm cheek, and she closed her eyes on that fiery sunset, wondering if his blood painted its reflection into Ultimicea's laughing eyes in that same exact shade.

A light knock on the door startled her.

She turned as it opened quietly, Irvine's tall figure filling the doorframe, grim faced beneath his hat. "Quis…turn on your TV. I think you might want to see this."

"What?" she asked, choking on the word, her heart pounding so hard in the side of her neck she could actually feel its insistent thump.

He just shook his head, and grabbed the remote off her desk, aiming it at the projector screen she sometimes used to show training videos. He flipped through a number of unimportant channels, and then stopped, freezing with his arm extended in that position while Quistis walked up to stand next to him.

It took her a moment to recognize the Presidential Manor of Deling City, and when she did the rapid cadence of her heartbeat suddenly stopped. Captured on film by some overzealous news crew and beamed directly into the homes of millions, a blazing performance of life and death played out on the manor's balcony. The players themselves weren't quite identifiable from the streets where the crew had set up their cameras, but Quistis knew who was involved anyway.

She watched the fireball of Seifer's spell geyser like fireworks up into the sky, and reached over to grip her desk as her knees turned watery. A few screams flared out here and there as a large piece of the balcony suddenly crashed down onto the pavement below, and just a few short moments later, two bodies came plunging after.

One streamed black hair behind it like an escaping raven; the other, a bright blonde halo that seared her irises.

Quistis wrapped a trembling hand over her mouth.

Ultimicea's landing dented the roof of an unfortunate bus. The impact rocked the entire vehicle, and the screams of those inside punctured Seifer's ears. He held onto Hyperion with one hand, her dress with the other as the driver hit the brakes hard, skidding them both along the slick metal surface.

She'd broken his fall somewhat, but he still couldn't breathe as the bus fishtailed to a halt that burned zigzagging black veins into the road below. His lungs sucked air greedily, and his shoulder burned like he'd pushed the socket directly into the center of the sun.

She stirred beneath him.

_Fuck. _

He caught just a glimpse of incensed black eyes before he jumped. His legs folded under him where he hit solid ground, and then he was up and running again, stumbling just a little, Hyperion dragging a screeching path along the street as he sprinted, pushing anyone out of his way who didn't move in time.

Seifer damn well hoped Leonheart was grateful to him, because she was pissed enough now to completely forget about him and Laguna. Hopefully the idiot at least used her distraction to escape instead of trying to mount some ridiculous, futilely heroic rescue effort.

But Squall tended to be annoyingly stupid like that sometimes, so he wouldn't hold his breath.

Seifer elbowed a man aside and ignored the angry shout that followed him.

He heard her scream of rage behind him, just a single warning blast of stressed vocal cords before the ground flash-banged into a circle of fire around him.

He flung himself forward, into a leap that turned into a diving somersault, flames hissing along his coat and lightly kissing his hair with a faint, reeking whisper. Seifer shed the burning coat as he stumbled free of the circle, untangling his arms and throwing it unceremoniously down, then bolting back up the street once more. The crowd parted before him like seawater around the bow of a ship, startled passerbys jerking aside as he came streaking past.

The loud screech of car brakes ripped through his head, and Seifer whipped around in time to see a van holding the scared pastel faces of a man and woman skidding right toward him-- he didn't have time to move, just one single breath of a second to instinctively throw up his arm, as though that would somehow help, while headlights stained the pavement with a twisted shadow-Seifer.

Someone screamed. He hoped it wasn't him--that would be embarrassing--but in that moment he wasn't sure; he could only hear the wail of tires on cement and smell the singed rubber of their swerving path over the road underneath. Nothing else mattered except the twin spheres of light turning his hair into a sunny corona around him, streaking his body in the halogen glare of impending death.

He felt his feet abruptly slide out from beneath him, and suddenly he hung suspended above the van's roof as it surged past beneath, just bobbing gently up and down as though captured inside some unseen bubble.

The bubble popped as the vehicle screeched safely past, and he landed agilely on his feet.

He turned toward the manor and the two figures outlined in a fuzzy haze of sunset crimson, one propped up by the other's shoulders, hair flickering long and unbound into the sky's fading light.

He thought he saw the backlit smudge of Squall's face nod slightly; Seifer saluted with Hyperion.

Then he swung around and vanished into the milling crowd of Deling City, his pounding boots forcing a passageway through shocked citizens.

* * *

Infirmary

Balamb Garden

Somehow, miraculously, they all arrived back at Garden alive.

She'd raced to Dr. Kadowaki's office at the first whispered rumors of Squall's appearance with a gravely wounded President Loire, heart lodged securely in her throat because there'd been no mention of a third man, no suggestion that Seifer had returned with them--but as she pushed open the door to the infirmary and stood panting in its entrance--it was a long run from her classroom even at a dead-sprint--Quistis saw him immediately, sitting on a bed receiving the ministrations of an angry Bria.

She sagged against the door jam.

"Ow! Shit, that burns!" he hissed, yanking his arm away and glowering.

"It's supposed to--it's cleaning out the poison. Now shut up and sit still, or I'll let you die."

He rolled his eyes. "If I was going to die, I'd probably already be a fucking goner by now."

Bria tightened her grip on his arm. "You're going to be in another second, if you don't _hold still_."

"You're a bitch." he said bluntly. "Are you really dating Ch-Zell? He seems a little slow but not stupid enough to put up with this all the time."

Bria jammed a cotton swab coated in some viscous blue liquid into the cut twining Seifer's right shoulder. He jerked upright, coming half off the exam table's papery sheets, the thin layer crackling explosively. "_Shit_!"

She pushed him back down, looking satisfied. "There. Done. Don't do anything too strenuous for a day or two. It's not deep enough for stitches, so I won't have the pleasure of sticking a needle in you."

"Oh damn." he snarled, still glaring at her as she moved off. Then his eyes flickered up the long legs of Quistis' slightly hunched body, still leaning against the doorway for support, and his brow loosened ever-so-faintly.

He hoped his face didn't give away how glad he was to see her. She returned his gaze steadily behind her glasses, chin lifted, and Seifer smiled a little looking at her. Only Trepe could manage that combination of beauty, stubborness and gentility with such flawless ease. It always slightly amazed him.

She would probably ignore him for a while after this, as the trend tended to go, so he leaned his elbows on his knees and drank her in, while she froze under his scrutiny like some shy woodland creature.

It took a moment for his ears--still ringing with the hollow memories of roaring flames and screaming tires--to register the smack of her boot heels, making their way across the polished floor tiles toward him. Then she was standing in front of him, glasses slipping ever-so slightly out of place, until he reached up to tap them back up against the bridge of her nose.

Her face clenched, and then she completely shocked Seifer by throwing both arms around his shoulders and burying her face in the front of his shirt.

His entire body tensed, arms held stiffly along his sides, and for a moment he thought he must look like an awkward Squall trying to endure public affection. She smelled softly of raspberries, and the curvature of her body laid a warmth along his chest that burned right down through the bone and into his internal organs.

He lifted one hand and gently brushed it along the top of her head.

"How's Laguna?" she eventually mumbled into the grimy, bloodied cloth of his top, pulling away and looking down at the floor.

Her bashfulness in showing him affection was annoying, but somehow endearing too. Did falling in love always feel vaguely like wanting to kick your own ass?

Seifer propped himself on his elbows and jerked his chin toward the closed door beyond the infirmary's main room. "He's in surgery. Kadowaki's working on him right now. I think he's in pretty bad shape."

Quistis followed the motion of his chin to Squall, sitting on the floor next to his father's room with his exhausted face bowed, hair hanging over the fatigued lines carved through the pink trench of his scar.

She touched Seifer's arm in good-bye and then moved on to her friend.

He watched her go, watched her slide down beside Squall and sit quietly with him, not saying anything but offering the gentle, wordless smile that was supposed to make everything all better. She'd given it to Seifer during his trials after his possession by Ultimicea, and he'd sneered at it then. Who the fuck was she to smile at him like she could fix everything simply because she was the great Quistis Trepe?

He knew now better than ever that she wasn't perfect, no matter how badly she wanted to be. But it was hard not to look at that mild expression and hope that it was somehow the adhesive that would hold together the shattered pieces of this situation. It was a stupid, infantile wish, but it flashed through his mind anyway, and he swallowed hard while he stared at them.

The clock on the wall behind him ticked away the rest of the night, minute by excruciating minute, and eventually Squall's head listed heavily to one side, jarring to a halt against Quistis' shoulder, whose eyes fixed resolutely ahead on the same clock that drove him slowly mad with its unerring persistence.

* * *

The Orphanage

Centra

The ocean slowly swallowed his boot tips. A strand of breeze picked up his hair and swung it with pendulum regularity in front of his eyes, back and forth and back and forth while Seifer glared up into the the scorching halo of sunlight ringing cotton puff clouds.

Ten feet or so away from him, thigh-deep in seawater and smiling brilliantly, Quistis played in gently rocking waves.

It was the kind of smile that he didn't get to see often--stripped of its authority and the barely-concealed sadness that seemed so commonplace in her eyes these days, just a lip-stretching look of euphoria, an almost child-like joy that made him smile too. With Quistis' customary mask of discipline peeled off, she looked even more beautiful than usual--this was the child he remembered from their days as Matron's family, the twinkling-eyed youth who built sand castles along the shoreline and bossed him around.

He'd stood on this same beach watching her back then, too, although it hadn't been with this strange sensation crawling in his throat and his heart attempting escape from his chest every time she glanced his way. Then, she'd had that horrible affliction exclusive to girls known as 'cooties' and her proclivity for ordering him around usually resulted in Seifer kicking over her castles or pushing her face into the sand.

Her hair streamed down and damp over her shoulders. She motioned to him and yelled for him to take off his shoes.

He kicked water at her, and laughed when she tried to shield herself and failed.

Her brow pinched in displeasure, and Seifer smirked, then took off running up the beach.

He heard her feet pounding water-packed sand behind him a few moments later, and started laughing again as one of her own shoes ricocheted off the back of his head. She had a good arm on her--for a girl, anyway. He told her so, and she replied with something that was hardly befitting of a bookish instructor looked to as a role model by dozens of students.

Seifer slowed down and let her catch up, then suddenly reversed directions and tackled her onto the sandy strip of land she chased him down.

Quistis screamed as she fell with his heavy weight on top of her, a high-pitched and surprisingly girly shriek that sent him into another fit of mocking laughter. "That was a little feminine for you, wasn't it, Instructor?" He picked up a wet, slimy handful of earth and smeared it across one of her cheeks.

"Seifer!"

He just laughed again and painted a matching stripe across her other cheek.

"Stop it!"

"Or what? You'll give me detention?"

Quistis struggled beneath him, and he quickly reached out to pin her wrists before she could hit him. She might throw like a girl--a superhuman one, anyway--but her punches felt more like getting hit by a truck, and he was still slightly sore from tangling with that monster in Deling City a few days ago. Not to mention, trying to explain a black eye given to him by a girl was always slightly embarrassing. She'd given him a few when they were children, so it wasn't as though he weren't used to it, but still.

"Get off me."

"You look hot with sand on your face, you know." he said, and she flushed bright red just as he'd predicted.

Seifer held Quistis down and planted a short, faintly salty kiss on her lips, then rolled off her.

Which might not have been the best idea in retrospect, because she threw herself at him as soon as he let up, small fists like battering rams against his still bruised muscles. "Ow, fuck, Quistis, lay off!"

"If I throw like a girl, I must hit like one too." she said calmly, keeping up her assault.

"All right, fine, I take it back."

Quistis cocked an eyebrow. "Say you're sorry." she demanded.

"Give me a kiss and I'll consider it."

The blush had yet to dissipate completely from her face, and it flared a little brighter now at his response, highlighting her cheekbones with the ember glow of a banked fire. She kept up her struggles a moment longer, then turned a haughty look on him and gave up. It was the only way he knew how to easily win an argument with Quistis; the thought of kissing him took all the wind out of her sails or something, he supposed. That particular deal never worked unless she really wanted something, usually having to do with his absence.

He wasn't quite sure what to make of her. She loved him, but the idea of sucking face with him repulsed her or something?

Maybe she didn't love him--maybe for once Quistis had suffered a split second of girliness and had blurted out those three little words in keeping with the emotional momentum of the moment without really meaning them.

In contradiction to his blunt nature for once, Seifer didn't bother asking Quistis what the hell the deal was. He didn't want to come across as some jerk pining away after unrequited love--that particular blow was too large a hit for his pride. People might mistake him for Squall, sitting in his office mooning over Rinoa.

"Laguna's doing much better." she informed him after a moment of quiet, her body reclining next to his on the warm sands, hair arranged like a gilt-edged fan around her pretty face.

He propped himself on his elbows. "Did I ask? I guess that's one less thing for Pubes to whine over, anyway."

She frowned at him. "Why do you always have to act like this, Seifer?"

"Why do your feet have to be so damn small?" he shot back.

She blushed again, and he scrutinized her carefully. "Don't tell me you're self-conscious about the size of your feet, instructor?"

Quistis looked down her nose at him, a difficult feat considering she was shorter, but somehow she managed, and her response tinkled cold and hard like icicles shoved through his ears. "My feet are perfectly averaged-sized, Seifer Almasy."

And that was the end of their discussion, until, after several pensive moments staring out at the ocean, profile sprinkled with the burnished ocher of daylight, Quistis stood up, dusting off the seat of her pants. Her voice was quiet when she spoke, but layered, and his heart turned over inside his chest.

"I think I'm ready to go inside now. Are you coming?"

Hunched slightly over in the sand with his knees pulled into his chest and his arms draped casually over them, Seifer barked a curt, acid "No" without really knowing why the word had emerged so brusquely.

She didn't say anything. Her footsteps echoed back to him, quietly muffled by the sand and the crashing ocean as she walked away from him.

* * *

The memories of her childhood, several just ghosts of fleeting recollections, even more completely forgotten, dangled from her shaking fingertips. On this finger hung a plastic ring, gold and green forming the circlet of faux jewelry that she thought had been Selphie's most prized adornment for a while, until she lost interest and moved onto something even shinier. On this finger, a cracked pink teacup she could almost remember playing with on warm summer afternoons, forcing Irvine and Zell into participation in overdressed tea parties. Out of the corner of one eye, she could actually see a framed phtograph of just such a scene, lovingly displayed beside several other pictures of the orphanage gang engrossed in various different activities. It depicted a grinning, sparkling-eyed Quistis in a pink bonnet and matching dress, holding her tea cup proudly high, seated at a round plastic table with a decidedly less gung ho Irvine and Zell, similarly clad.

And in the background stood Seifer, pulling faces, a petulant-looking Squall slightly behind him, hair mussed by an ocean breeze.

Her lips softened into a smile.

In her right palm, she held the rubber ball she could remember Zell playing with, bouncing it off walls, furniture and, occasionally, other children. He'd made the mistake of hitting Seifer with it once, and a brawl had ensued that smashed a wooden chair and a picture of Cid and Matron from their wedding day. Quistis saw flailing bodies and pummeling fists in her mind, snarling lips and indignant green eyes, so alike the ones she'd left alone on the beach nearly an hour ago now.

Even then, his gaze carried the tarnish of scars.

In her left palm, she cradled a necklace. Bulky and rather sloppily-crafted, it had obviously been created by a child. Its chain shimmered bright silver against her palm, a little rusted in places by the corrosion of salty air, but mostly untouched. The center consisted of an agate, translucent orange blasted smooth by water and sand, seated somewhat crookedly inside a silver ring hanging from the end of the chain, a few drops of dried glue visible around the stone's polished glass perimeter. It wasn't an item she really recognized--but something about it tickled Quistis' mind, because when she set the others down, she kept it coiled tight and coil inside her sweating palm, and then, reluctantly, finally, walked over to where Matron had died.

Someone had scrubbed her blood from the floor. Cid, maybe. The auburn memory of it still tainted the floorboards--Quistis could see splotches of it here and there, where strategically-placed rugs and chair legs couldn't quite cover everything, and the walls…the walls…

_-She saw pieces of Matron's kindly face splatter against the walls, drooling their strings of ruby and gray clots down the cheerful green of wallpaper-_

Quistis knuckled one burning eye, and then the other.

Behind her, the door opened with the whisper swish of oiled hinges.

He saw her standing near the back door, and, leaning a shoulder against the door frame that bordered his tall body, Seifer crossed his arms and watched her slide loosely down onto her knees, as though they'd just quietly stopped working, the sinew of her muscles dissolving into water around the bone of her legs.

And then she buried her face in her hands and he couldn't tell whether she was crying or not, but it still hurt--it hurt like the unhealed wound of his mother's death, to stand there and watch that proud woman hunched into such a defeated posture, and it hurt like knowing that his entire family was gone now, and he'd contributed to their absence.

Seifer looked down at his feet, coated with two wide strips of damp sand curved over the toes.

He didn't know exactly why he stared at them--it was easier than looking at Quistis, he supposed, and it gave him something to focus on beside the sudden stinging in his eyes. It was just one white-hot razor slash of pain across the retinas, and then it was gone, but its memory lingered as he raised his gaze once more to her bowed head.

She lifted her face, maybe sensing him, and his eyes skittered for just a second to something swinging from her left hand, catching miniature spears of sunlight that found their way through a window and reflecting tawny light into his eyes.

It was his necklace, Seifer realized with some surprise, wondering where she'd found it. Well, not really his--he'd made it for her, when she'd fallen into some black well of despair, probably brought on by the destruction of one of her favorite dolls or some other childhood grievance. He remembered handing it to her, almost shyly--unlike him--and he remembered her taking it with a quiet sniffle, inspecting it with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child unaccustomed to getting much but slightly worn hand-me-downs. He'd acted mean to her right afterward, of course, after realizing that the act of kindness might ruin his reputation, and she'd thrown it at his head, alternating between crying and attempting to punch him. She'd ran back into the cottage screaming for Matron, and he'd unburied it from the sand kicked over the top of it and slipped it inside his pocket, miffed that she'd rebuffed him.

He'd put it back into one tiny, slightly curled fist later that night while she slept, and they'd never spoken of it again.

Quistis looked calmly composed as she stood and faced him, but Seifer noticed a faint tremble to her knees that betrayed her emotional state.

He took a step forward, then stopped. Then another, halting, uncertain, a faltering stride that felt as foreign to Seifer as public affection must feel to Squall. He kept going, while she just stood there, and when he finally reached her he just pulled her into his arms, harder than he'd meant to, one hand softly cradling the back of her head as he pressed her cheek to his chest.

"I'm sorry." he said, and that word, too, felt foreign against his tongue, an exotic dish for the taste buds. He'd only said the phrase a few times throughout his life, and then only rarely had he meant it. He meant it now, more than he ever had or would again.

"For what, Seifer? Matron?"

"Fuck, I'm not even sure." he replied, then laughed shortly at his own stupidity.

She pulled away from him, the sunlight caressing her face strikingly, turning her eyes into burning sapphires that stabbed him through the chest, two separate spear jabs of feeling that impaled his heart. The smile she gave him was…pure, beautiful, fucking amazing.

"Well, thank you, Seifer. I'm…" She ducked her head a little, almost bashfully. "I'm glad you're here. I mean that."

He didn't really know what to say to that, except maybe "Really? Well great, you wanna' fuck then?" He didn't think that would go over very well, but poetic romance had never been his forte. He wondered how Lionheart had ever managed to capture the heart of Rinoa, a girl most fond of pretty sunsets and candlelit dinners. Lionheart probably had less stomach for any of that shit than he did.

"I suppose we should probably be leaving. The ferry back to Garden will be leaving soon. And I'm getting stationed in Esthar tomorrow. It's arduous, but we're making some progress in trying to take back the city."

_They couldn't go one fucking day without talking about the war. Without just enjoying Seifer and Quistis time and telling the rest of the world to go take a flying fuck. _Seifer thought bitterly, letting go of her.

He had to keep doing that, he realized--let go of her, without ever really having her in the first place. He was getting sick of it. One day, he might let go and find out she just didn't exist anymore.

The thought terrified him.

She stood there talking battle tactics and yammering about something Zell had done yesterday--in other words, a bunch of stuff he didn't really give a shit about--her face painted in the flattering gold and faint rose highlights of approaching dusk, when suddenly something in Seifer's mind snapped.

_Fuck it_ he decided, grabbing her face in both hands and kissing her. He was going to kiss this woman like he fucking meant it, dammit, and when the embrace was finished, she was going to make him understand, in no uncertain terms, exactly where he stood with her. No more giving him little glimpses of hope, followed by long bouts of silence. No more jerking him around on a fucking string--Seifer Almasy wasn't anyone's puppet, not anymore, dammit.

He tried to transmit everything he felt through the pressure of his lips--it was a hard kiss, tinged with the faint, faint edge of desperation, because Seifer knew this was probably his last chance at anything with her--if she rejected him again, that was it. Time to cut the ties she fastened to him, because he was done sitting quietly in the fucking corner waiting for Quistis to throw him a bone.

She looked completely flabbergasted when he pulled away, and it might have actually been hilarious, if his heart weren't currently trying to claw its way up into his throat. Seifer Almasy had finally done what he'd always attempted during years of boring lectures--he had completely and irrevocably shattered the unflappable Instructor Trepe's composure.

"Do you want me or not, Trepe?" he blurted out angrily, then snarled a curse inside his head. That hadn't come out quite the way he'd meant it to. "Stop fucking with me. Right now. I don't want to be your friend, or that guy you sorta' fucking like but aren't quite sure about yet. I, Seifer Almasy, am fucking _in love _with Garden's stupidest, most fucking oblivious instructor. That would be you, Trepe. Stop fucking ignoring me, and either do something about it right now, or don't. I'm done with you jerking me around. Got it?" Seifer demanded, putting all 6' 2" of him in her face. "If you want to keep pretending this doesn't happen, then do it. But I'm gone."

Quistis opened her mouth, then snapped it closed. His eyes drilled her like the battlefield clash of blade through bone, just inches away, smoldering hot and drowning deep. She thought nervously, oddly, that you didn't drown in Squall's eyes--his were the stone that their shade suggested, a blank wall simply not deep enough to fall into, except maybe for Rinoa. This was an entirely different man standing before her despite the identical scar and lack of social grace, and Quistis wondered how she could have ignored him for Squall all these years.

"You're right." she admitted, scraping her voice up from where it hovered, somewhere inside her stomach where everything seemed to have plummeted. "You're right, Seifer, and we've had this discussion before--"

"And you always make up some kind of shit excuse." he snapped. "I want a straight answer this time, or else--"

"Or else what? You don't have the right to threaten me." Quistis fired back, tilting her face back to wage war against his glare with one of her own, feeling angry herself for some reason. Maybe it was that Seifer just did that to her.

"Or else I'm leaving, and you can go back to panting over Pubes or whatever the hell it is you want to do!" he yelled.

"That was the worse declaration of someone's feelings I've ever heard."

"Then stop watching that weepy shit you women like so much and come back down to earth, _Instructor_. I'm not your fucking knight in shining armor, and you're not the princess of the story, so stop acting like a snooty bitch."

Quistis punched him, hard, landing the blow dead center to his nose. She felt detached from the swing, like she was watching someone else's fist clench, someone else's knuckles impact soft cartilage.

He stumbled back a little, but miraculously his face remained unmarred, the nose refusing to give way to gushing tributaries of red. He'd bled more easily as a child; she remembered giving him a few bloody noses during some of their more violent altercations.

She saw the hand not gripping the necklace she still clutched in her fingers lift, as though someone else now controlled the limb, and she couldn't honestly guess whether she meant to hit him again, or carress the flesh she'd just savaged.

Seifer caught her wrist before she could make up her mind, grabbing hard enough that she knew he meant business, and for a split second Quistis thought he was going to punch her back.

But he didn't. The furrow between his eyebrows carved itself deeper, the green eyes narrowing down tighter, and then he tossed her hand back in his face, snarling an angry "Fine."

He turned away, and began to walk back toward the door he'd entered through.

Some panicked instinct inside Quistis made her chase after him, some small, niggling thread of knowledge warning her that this was it--this was her last shot, and she was about to lose him. The hammer blow of that knowledge was enough to propel her forward, into his broad back, slamming Seifer into the brackish ocean air through the door he'd just ripped open.

Quistis heard him yell "What the _hell_?" before he face planted hard in the sand, and stumbled on his outstretched feet, landing gracelessly across his upturned back. He began to flail beneath her, and she rolled quickly off him, losing hold of the necklace somewhere in the chaos and pushing up onto her knees.

"The fuck are you trying to do? Kill me?" Seifer demanded, spitting sand from his mouth, glowering darkly at her as he wiped a wrist across grainy lips.

"As tempting an option as that is at times, that wasn't the original goal."

"Oh really? Then what the fuck was the original goal? Did you want to--oh, I don't know--write me some love poetry and then say 'Let's just be friends' for a while? Or maybe you could kick me in the balls for an hour or so, and then nurse me back to health."

"What do you expect from me, Seifer?"

"I don't know!" he yelled, throwing his hands up in frustration. "I just want you to knock off this are-we aren't-we shit, Quistis. Half the time you fucking ignore me, and then you feed me touchy-feely 'But Seifer, I _do _care' lines." he mocked in a whiny falsetto. "Just shut up. Just shut the hell up if you don't mean any of it, Trepe. I don't need you to 'care' about me out of pity. I'm not the fucking stray puppy you have to take care of until you find someone who actually wants it."

"I've never helped you just because I felt obligated to. I did it because I wanted to."

"You did it because I was your one failure, and that pissed you off, so you had to fix it. Because you have this fucking incessant need to be perfect."

"No!" Quistis snapped, losing her tenuous control over her emotions once more. Why had he always pushed her over the edge so much faster than anyone else? "That's you talking, Seifer. That's what you assume, because you can't believe anyone would support 'the traitor' just because. There has to be some sort of ulterior motive, I suppose, because everyone hates you, right?"

"There has to be an ulterior motive, because it's you, Instructor, and nothing this fucking good could just be handed to me."

That shut her up. She watched him angrily wipe down the rest of his face as best he could, eventually giving up with his hands and irately ripping his shirt off over his shoulders to scrub away what he'd missed with his palms.

He peeled the shirt away from his face in time to catch just a flash of blonde hair before something struck him hard in the chest, and Seifer fell back on the sand with Quistis in his arms, Garden's most poised instructor straddling the bare torso of one very surprised ex-knight.

She grabbed a handful of sandy hair at the nape of his neck, pulled his face up to hers, and kissed him hard.

It was the first time he could remember that she'd ever instigated anything between them, and it stunned him enough that he simply lay there for a moment while her mouth moved along his. He felt her hands trailing two streaks of warmth up either side of his ribcage and shivered, finally gathering enough of his wits to return the force of her lips, his hands slipping to her hips and yanking them down hard against his. He pulled away and trailed kisses down her supple throat, across the hollow of it and onto her collarbone. She ground slightly against the front of his pants as she adjusted herself, and he suppressed a moan. Seifer slithered one hand from her hip up under her shirt, lightly tracing the sensitive skin there as he removed his other hand too and gently ran it along the waistband of her pants, flattening it out over her stomach and gliding his fingers gently over the curve of one breast. He cupped the soft arc of it, and suddenly she stiffened and abruptly sat up.

Seifer dropped his hand. "What's wrong?" he asked as she climbed off him, sitting up too and trying not to think about how aroused he was. He hoped she didn't turn back toward him suddenly--certain parts of him might accidentally take out one of her eyes.

Quistis sighed heavily, facing the ocean and drawing her knees up to her chest. "I'm sorry…I just can't. Not that, Seifer."

"Not what?" he asked, moving to crouch next to her. "What happened, Quistis? Did someone fucking touch you? I swear to fucking Hyne--"

"You remember the fire cavern, and Dagan, of course." she interrupted him.

His stomach clenched at his father's name. "No, I had completely forgotten that my dad tried to have you gang raped and me killed. Thanks for reminding me though."

She flicked a cold look his way. "Don't be condescending." She dug a toe into the sand. "I know nothing actually…happened, but they still…touched me. I keep remembering that every time you…"

Seifer glared down at his hands as though they'd personally offended him.

"I'm sorry, Seifer. I just can't…I'm not ready yet." She glanced over at him, her eyes liquid in the sun's copper illumination.

He wanted to bring his father back to life and snap that bastard's fucking neck for putting that look in her eyes. He wanted to kill him a million different ways, each more horrific and painful than the last, because he'd let them victimize the beautiful young woman sitting next to him on this beach they'd played on when she'd been far smaller, and more innocent.

Instead, he picked up one of her hands where it lay curved over a knee, and threaded his fingers through hers while he watched the sun drown slowly in the waves crawling their slow and inevitable way up the shoreline.

Quistis smiled gently, fondly at him while he wasn't looking, and leaned her head down against his powerful shoulder.

Eventually, she fell asleep like that. He carried her back into the cottage and settled her into her old bed--the sentimental Matron never had gotten rid of them, and even now months after her death they were still tidily made, draped in sunny patchwork quilts and colorful pillows. She was too big for it now, of course--her feet nearly hung off the edge, and it was barely wide enough for her slender frame, let alone the two of them, but she didn't stir when he set her down and dropped a few blankets over her. Seifer pushed Squall's old bed up against Quistis' and sat down, but he didn't try to sleep. His 6' 2" frame would feel even more crowded than hers, so instead he watched the sun set through the dusty window over their heads, picturing his father's death in the sky as it eventually darkened into midnight black. 


	21. Chapter 20

**Chapter Twenty**

Dormitory

Balamb Garden

The look that twisted Seifer's handsome features was less furious than his usual furrow-browed snarl, but not much, and then probably only because any anger he might feel found itself tempered by momentary bewilderment.

Quistis, standing in front of the mirror over her bathroom sink with him watching from the doorway, calmly kept brushing her hair. It fell like gold ribbons between the tines of her comb, polished glass shiny and so soft he wanted to touch it--but only for a moment, a short few seconds that ticked past behind him on the alarm clock gracing her meticulously neat nightstand.

Until her words fully registered in Seifer's mind.

"You want us to go to dinner with Chicken Wuss?"

"_Zell _wants us to go to dinner with him." Quistis corrected, setting the brush down and opening the door of a small medicine cabinet. She pulled out a few makeup items and begin to carefully apply first a rich black eyeliner and then a few sparing dabs of mascara, transforming her already beautiful blue eyes into the slightly smoky, exotically striking gaze of a goddess. Seifer blinked dumbly for a moment, agape at the metamorphosis of the quietly bookish Instructor Trepe into this stranger with her mysterious bedroom eyes wafting promises of sex and intrigue toward him with each flutter of the long dark lashes.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, not quite sure what to do with them. Feeling awkward pissed him off, so he scowled at her. "What the hell's with the makeup?"

She glanced over at him as she began to clean off the counter. "Why, does it look bad?"

"No. I've just never seen you wear it before." _And you look even hotter than normal, which isn't exactly making it easy for me to keep my hands off you. _He bemoaned--not for the first time--the cruel twist of fate that had granted Quistis such a lovely face and body. If Hyne really loved Seifer, He would have created Quistis ugly. As it was, just looking at the pretty young instructor made him want to throw her against a wall and ravage her--which probably wouldn't go over well, and since he liked his testicles where they were, Seifer opted instead to just lean casually against the door frame picturing unsexy images. Like Squall doing yoga in skin-tight shorts. Or Cid with his shirt off. Or Chicken Wuss naked.

_Ah, fuck. _He hadn't wanted that last picture lurking anywhere near his frontal lobe, even for the purpose of taking his mind off Trepe's attractiveness, and now it wouldn't leave.

Seifer stared at the closed lid of her toilet for a moment, debating just how badly he needed to throw up. And how hard she would hit him if any vomit splashed out on her bare feet.

"It will just be a few people, no one you don't already know. Squall, Irvine and Selphie should all be there, and Bria too, I believe."

"That's not what makes me want to break the mirror out and slit my own wrists."

Quistis frowned slightly at him, then flicked off the light and slipped past him into her tidy bedroom. "This is the only time for a while we're all back at Garden at the same time. Some of the fighting's slowed down in Esther a bit, which is the only reason I'm here right now, but I'll be going back in a few days. Selphie is taking the Ragnarok down near Centra, and the rest are still awaiting orders but will probably be shipped out any day now. It's up to Squall; he's been shifting us around quite a bit, lending some support here and there where it's really necessary. It will be nice to go out after all these months at war, Seifer."

"Yeah, but with Chicken Wuss for shit's sake? I'd rather take it from behind from Squall while watching Cid masturbate."

The horrified look that crossed her face told him that particular image was one she preferred to stay far, far away from. "Seifer!"

"Why don't we just stay here and hang out? Or take a couple of the water cycles out for a ride. You know, something that _doesn't _involve the Wuss. And I could do without staring at Pubes' sulky face, too. And the small one with the loud mouth is annoying."

"Those are my friends you're talking about." she replied coldly.

"I'm just being honest. Messenger Girl makes me want to shoot myself in the head."

"Her name is Selphie. Look, Zell specifically wanted you here tonight. The whole purpose of this dinner is to thank you for saving his and Bria's lives. You could at least be gracious."

"Or I could just blow him off. It's not really that hard of a choice; spend two hours not punching someone I really, really want to, or do something more enjoyable, like hanging myself or getting eaten by a T-Rexaur."

"Seifer." she scolded again.

"Stop with the patronizing tone, Instructor, or I'll sic the T-Rex on you."

"Then stop being difficult." Quistis insisted, stopping off at her closet to collect a pair of black heels. "Just come and be polite. You'll hurt Zell's feelings if you don't show up."

Seifer laughed heartily. "I spent most of the time I was supposed to be doing homework thinking up new ways to hurt Wuss' feelings. Besides, isn't he a fucking lightweight or something when it comes to drinking?"

"How does Zell not being able to consume large quantities of alcohol without making a spectacle of himself factor into anything?" She slipped on her shoes, the simplistically classy footwear nicely complimenting the elegant but plain black dress she wore. Seifer's eyes dropped to her legs, cream silk against the ebony contradiction of the material grazing just above her knees, stretching on forever like endless pearl stalks. He wanted to run his hand up her thigh, under the thin gauze of her outfit, tear out the hairclip pinning her mane into a pretty updo and…No, dammit. She'd made it clear to him she wasn't ready, and he didn't have any right to push that.

But fuck did he want to toss her down on the bed and just have his way with her. He'd put a couple of wrinkles in those fucking ironed-stiff sheets of hers, dammit.

"I can just see Wuss being the emotional type of drunk is all." Seifer said at last, answering her earlier question. "What if he tries to hug me?"

"Then maybe you should break his neck." Quistis suggested dryly. "Hyne forbid he touch you or something."

"Would _you _want Wuss' little chicken hands all over you?" Seifer demanded pointedly, crossing his arms.

She ignored that and walked over to shut down her computer.

He frowned. "_Would _you?"

"Yes, Seifer." Quistis responded calmly. "Every night, I yearn for my one true love Zell Dincht to take me away from everything. We'll escape Garden on a giant floating blimp shaped like a heart, where he will feed me chocolate-dipped strawberries while staring lovingly into my eyes. We'll float to a distant island and be married, and then I will have ten of his children, all perfect little angels with blonde hair, blue eyes, and my darling husband's proclivity for hot dogs."

"You could have just said 'no.'" he grumbled. "The thought of Wuss actually having offspring makes me want to drown myself. Or them. Hyne should never let that man taint the gene pool."

"A lot of people would say that about you." she pointed out.

"That's because they're fucking morons who don't understand what a benefit to the world it would be to have miniature Seifers running around."

Quistis smiled at that image, picturing each little feathery-headed, iron-willed child just as ornery as their father, ticking time bombs of ambition and arrogance. Her smile slid a little off her lips as she thought of where Seifer's ambition had taken him, slithering to just the very corners, phantom soft along the bow of her mouth.

But he was here now, and maybe, just maybe, a better man for all he'd been through. Thinking of that, Quistis impulsively reached out and took one of his hands in hers.

He looked down at their laced fingers.

She squeezed his hand, her palm burning warmly in his, and looked beseechingly at him with the glittering gems of her eyes. "Please, Seifer. Just come out with us tonight. I promise we'll have some time alone later."

"What do I look like to you? A whipped little pansy?" he snapped.

* * *

An hour later, Seifer found himself sitting across from a yammering Zell, wondering why the hell he'd let Quistis talk him into this, and also just how far you had to thrust a fork up a man's nose before it punctured his brain and killed him.

The little fuck wouldn't shut up. Quistis' lectures hadn't lasted as long as each one of Zell's one hundred and fifty million anecdotes. Squall's distrust of everyone didn't stretch as wide as each excruciating minute of his life that slipped through Seifer's clenching fingers. The hummingbird buzz of his heart riding its wave crest of pent-up irritation did not beat as swiftly as Dincht's lips flapped.

To Zell's right, Squall sat with his arms pulled in stiffly along his sides, looking as thrilled as Seifer felt, his salad untouched and his granite eyes glazed over into marble blankness. The piece of hair that was the one failure of his military precise appearance hung lazily over an eyebrow, dipping almost onto the eyelid itself. It was the only portion of him not schooled into rigid obedience, the storm circling its eye of calm that comprised the rest of his look--clean-shaven cheeks and perfectly-ironed clothes, empty slate face that revealed nothing. It was a little eerie, the vacant mirror without a reflection, just waiting for the shadow outline of its next admirer to give it a sense of life, if only just for a moment.

He always looked like that to some degree or another, Seifer knew--it was just the man's way--but that stone gaze had never exactly been vacuous, just unemotional. Meeting his gaze now felt like staring into a pond, inky dark and never-ending, just one narrow tunnel of nothing that seemingly had no bottom.

Quistis shifted next to him. He hoped she was regretting this. He hoped her brain felt like the night's first casualty, a slow trickling leak out one of her ears and down the graceful curve of her neck.

Zell was going to be the second, if he didn't shut the hell up soon.

The night at least hadn't been a total bust, though, Seifer had to admit. Though nothing so far had made up for this endless stretch of Zell-speak he endured now, the evening was young and the opportunity to get the talkative martial artist intoxicated and then sell him into some lonely, fat old man's harem was still a vague possibility. Quistis probably wouldn't appreciate that, but Seifer thought he might actually get Squall to help him, and maybe the cowboy too if he played his cards right.

Irvine, surprisingly enough, was the main component in keeping the outing almost tolerable. He was an unexpectedly good storyteller with a subtle humor that actually kept Seifer entertained up until Zell decided to butt in with some of his own adventures, most involving hot dogs, angry lunch ladies, and some disturbing hiding places the aforementioned hot dogs had disappeared into. He'd always thought of the sharpshooter as a bit of a prissy asshole with his pretty face and his accent and sly courteousy that left women falling all over themselves everywhere around him, but in all grudging honesty, part of Seifer's dislike for the man might have stemmed from the fact that ladies flocked to the tall charmer, and he resented that attention being directed away from him.

That didn't completely banish his stereotypical prejudice that the man might one day try to rape him in the showers even if he did seem genuinely in love with the loud annoying girl, but it did tamp down on Seifer's urge to mess up that pretty little nose a little.

Although he still thought the man needed a fucking haircut.

He checked the clock over Squall's head, not bothering to be subtle about it. Quistis nudged him sharply with her elbow as Zell paused to shovel food in his mouth, and he slid one of his hands onto her thigh. And pinched, hard.

She yelped and jumped a little, bobbling the table and knocking over Irvine's empty water glass.

" 'S wong, wuiti?"

Seifer didn't even attempt to decode that.

"Ya' know, people might understand you better if your big mouth wasn't always full, Dincht."

Seifer broke out in snickers and picked up that thread of conversation before Quistis could attempt to shut him up. "But getting on his knees is the only way he can get ahead."

"Hey!" Zell protested, pieces of half-chewed food spraying out the corners of his mouth. A green string of masticated dinner struck Squall on the cheek, the rope of drool interspersed with soggy chunks of lettuce tracing a faint line of emerald down toward his chin.

He wiped it off and shot Zell a dirty look, which was generous of him in Seifer's opinion. If that had been Seifer's cheek, he'd have put his fist through those blinding white teeth.

And they were sight-impairing, Seifer realized, zeroing in on Zell's face for the first time that night as the young man dragged an arm across his lips. He'd been trying his best to forget Chicken Wuss' existence, but as that was obviously impossible, he might as well pick up on something to ridicule.

Irvine beat him to it. "I gotta' ask, Dincht, because it's been bothering me all night; what the hell is wrong with your teeth?"

"What da' you mean?"

"I mean I need sunglasses every time you open your mouth. Did ya' forget to swallow or something while you were on your knees getting ahead?" he guffawed while the women both speared dirty looks in his direction.

The girly-faced cowboy really wasn't bad at all, Seifer decided. Maybe he'd stop picturing himself stealing the man's ridiculous hat and shoving it up his ass. Although probably not, because the thought was a pretty amusing one.

"I bleached my teeth." Zell explained. "It was for a date with Bria, then she got pissed at me for breaking the computer in the infirmary, so it didn't work out. And I can't get the stuff off my teeth."

"Well, you ain't supposed to leave it on for three nights, dumbass. And how did you break the computer, overload it with porn or something?"

"Uh…sorta.'" Zell confessed, scratching the back of his neck. "I was looking at this one site and got a virus in it…then everything went screwy, she started yelling and kicked me out."

"So she still pissed? That's why she's not here tonight?" Irvine asked.

"Hey, I already told you she's just sick!" he shot back defensively.

_Yeah, sick of your face. _He held back from saying it aloud at the last moment, because it seemed too 'Seifer' a comment. Not that Chicken Wuss was smart enough to put two and two together and realize that Quistis' new friend 'Devon' acted a lot like his old nemesis, but he didn't exactly look forward to nagging warnings from Quistis to be more careful about letting his old personality slip through.

_These people are all stupid. _Seifer thought disgustedly. It was no wonder Ultimicea had chosen him as her Knight and not one of them. Chicken Wuss with his irritating stories and idiotic, goofy grin, three left feet and talent for scaring off women with his dumbness, and Leonheart with that sullen pout on his face. Although in all fairness, he supposed he couldn't really blame Pubes. Before, he would have scoffed at the guy, bragged about how much better he was than his rival, falling pathetically to pieces over some stupid woman. But that was before Quistis, before he grudgingly understood just what it could do to a man to lose the one thing that was most important to him in life.

Over the next hour their dinner continued in much the same fashion, with the added bonus of drunken Zell antics, while Seifer looked hopefully around the restaurant for a lonely old man who might appreciate the company of a short, loud blonde love slave. Sometime between declaring his love for 'Devon' and thanking him profusely for saving Bria, Zell decided to shed his pants and use their tabletop as a spontaneous dance floor while he warbled horribly into the opening of a beer bottle. Squall's blank china doll mask had finally cracked into bland annoyance, an expression not a bit offputting to his intoxicated friend, who apparently became even more oblivious with the consumption of alochol. He noisily tried a few times to get Squall to join him on top of the table, even finally getting down on his knees in front of the man and serenading him with something Seifer didn't recognize, but whether that was because he didn't actually know the song or Zell had destroyed it so completely and utterly it was no longer identifiable, he didn't know.

Seifer shot an agitated look at Irvine beneath his eyebrows. The cowboy shrugged and returned to his own beer, nursing it healthily along. "Sorry, man. He gets like this. Quis shoulda' warned ya.'"

Something in the sharpshooter's dark gaze alerted him. It wasn't so much the keen intelligence he'd never really looked for, but an intense focus that pierced him in jagged predator's talon jabs, forcing their way into his mind like they wanted something specific and meant to get it. Seifer's hackles rose like a wary dog's, and he stared the man back down, narrowing his eyes slightly. _You want to back off, before I grab you by that stupid ponytail and swing you around my fucking head? _He didn't like people trying to analyze him; his head was crowded enough as it was without someone else trying to force their way inside.

Irvine eventually looked away, taking another swig of his beverage. Seifer glanced off as well, flicking his eyes toward the bathroom where Quistis and Selphie had disappeared some time ago. What the hell did women do in there anyway?

When he looked back, Zell was still, predictably, making an idiot of himself, Squall had quietly vanished, and a cocktail napkin covered in slanted scrawl occupied the center portion of Seifer's empty plate.

_I know who you are now. I love Quistis like a sister; hurt her, and I'll hurt you. Make her happy. _

Seifer looked up at Irvine. The long-haired cowboy nodded his head very slightly, and then went back to his drink without a word.

* * *

When Quistis finally managed to extract herself from the endless missile barrage of Selphie questions concering the nature of the relationship between her and the mysterious 'Devon,' she spotted Squall heading toward the back exit, and followed him.

It only took him a moment to notice and whip around, even though she was quiet about it--after all, if his skills hadn't been so finely honed, his career as a soldier would have ended a long time ago. She smiled reassuringly at him, and slipped through the door he held open, out into the cold nighttime air. The last biting traces of winter painted the sky in misty streaks of cold fronts and rain-dense cloud banks, wrapping her like a frosty mantle. A few intermittent, stinging raindrops sliced needle-thin into her pores, but the scent of clean air crawling up her nostrils was such a welcome reprieve from cigarette smoke and Zell's beer breath that she couldn't quite bear to go back inside.

Instead, she stood with Squall as he stared up into the sky, his face stonily lifeless.

Her heart turned over in her chest for him. She knew she hadn't been the only one studying their little group that night and acutely feeling the loss of their sixth friend from the tight-knit circle. Having Seifer as a replacement just hadn't been the same. He'd brought the odd five back to an even six, and though she'd been grateful for his warm body next to her, he was a poor attempt at filling the usual space where she once would have perched, girlishly charming and softly beautiful. If Quistis had been feeling a little depressed that night thinking of Rinoa, what must Squall be experiencing?

She touched his arm gently, but didn't say anything.

He was the first to break the silence, surprising her. "You never asked me why I decided to save him."

Quistis thought about that for a moment, wondering why Squall had chosen that particular subject. "I did wonder at first, but I suppose I was concentrating more on just being grateful that he was alive. Then life just got in the way; a lot's happened over the last several months. Why did you help him, then, since we're talking about it?"

Squall lowered his chin, but still didn't look at her, sliding his hands into the pockets of his black dress trousers. "Because you lied to me."

"About what?"

He inhaled deeply. It was a hard breath to take--Quistis could hear the way it rattled in his chest, and his mouth trembled faintly as he continued. "Do you remember when Ultimicea first took control of Rinoa, and Dr. Kadowaki induced a coma to keep her from breaking free? Then, in the infirmary."

Quistis shook her head. "I don't remember. We don't have to talk about this, if you don't want to."

"I asked you if you loved him, and you said 'no.'" Squall replied, ignoring her last comment. "You lied to me. So I arranged things with Headmaster Cid and Dr. Kadowaki. Cid and I had access to the weapons, and we switched the real bullets out with stunners."

"And the blood?" she asked, curious despite herself. She'd seen the viscous red spreading in an ugly oil slick beneath him over Balamb's peaceful fields. She still saw that red, red meadow sometimes at night while she tried to sleep.

"Special effects." he answered quietly. "We rigged Seifer's clothing with packets of fake blood, so when the barbs hit, they exploded. Cid and I cleaned everything up. No one knew."

"He didn't want anyone to." Quistis guessed. "I suppose he just wanted to live out the rest of his life in peace. And then I found him in FH." She watched Squall's jaw clench. "Why did you send me there to find him?"

He paused for a long, long time before answering, and she thought he wasn't going to say anything else. But finally he turned toward her, and the look in his eyes took a butcher's cleaver to her insides. His gaze held everything he would not allow his face to display, every nuance of misery and anguish trapped inside him for months, the hollow eyes of a tortured man who has lost all comprehension of the word 'hope.'

"Squall." she whispered, swallowing against the aching pain that filled her own throat.

"Because you were just as miserable as I am."

_And you thought that even though you never had your happy ending where love was concerned, at least maybe you could help someone else get theirs. _

The fluttering, wild bird that was her heart expanded into a painful balloon, throbbing and too-large for her chest. This was the Squall Leonheart a naïve, love struck Quistis had always yearned to unearth; the compassionate, selfless youth lurking in his shell of blasé oblivion. It was the romantic's dream, a take on the ages-old tale of bad boy turned sensitive knight in shining armor. It was the one whimsy she had allowed herself amidst all the stiff practicality.

But he wasn't her knight in shining armor, and his princess was gone now.

"I'm sorry." she said quietly. "It isn't fair that it was her."

"I used to dream about her." he said hoarsely. "But I don't anymore."

_She was just gone…like the domesticated hawk released into its natural habitat only to be captured and eaten by something far larger. _

She moved to embrace him, and he didn't push her away like he once would have. He did nothing, just hanging like so much dead meat in her arms, cold to the touch in a way that frightened her. They'd lost Rinoa, and Squall was slipping away from them as well, floundering under the burden of running Garden, fighting a war, and mourning over the loss of something so precious. She couldn't fix that, and her uselessness killed Quistis.

It didn't matter how perfect she aspired to be. What good did perfection do if it couldn't heal one of her closest friends, if it couldn't coat them all in an unbreakable safety net that prevented the loss Squall had suffered from ever happening to another of them? She couldn't stop the brash, reckless Seifer from getting himself killed if Hyne had other plans, and she couldn't prevent the breaking of Zell's big, goofy heart if Bria one day found herself on the wrong end of an enemy soldier's bullet.

She couldn't even get a handle on her own damn emotions. She'd yanked Seifer around for months, because she'd let the debilitating numbness of fear hold her tight in its winter fingers, while around her loved ones died and people lost forever what Seifer was clumsily trying to give her.

The door behind them banged open, startling her. Quistis spun as she reached for the whip she wasn't carrying, dropping her hand as her brain registered Seifer's exasperated face. "Am I interrupting something?"

Squall brushed by him without answering, indifferently bumping Seifer with his shoulder as he passed. The ex-knight whirled back toward him, looking like he might take a swing at the other man's retreating skull, until Quistis laid a restraining hand along his forearm, shaking her head. "Let him go."

"I just thought you two might like to know that Chicken Wuss just puked up the hundred pounds of food he ate tonight, and we've been kicked out. Sorry if I ruined some kind of moment."

"It was nothing." Quistis said quietly. _Just a thousand years of pain, crammed into only a few minutes. _"Let's go home."

* * *

Squall Leonheart's Office

Balamb Garden

_The woman standing in the meadow with him wore her face, but that didn't mean it was actually her._

_It hadn't been her for a long time now. _

_"I miss you so much." she whispered, eyes brimming and those lush full lips he pined so desperately for quivering with the contained power of her grief. They were smiling lips, kissing lips, and the last time he'd seen them, they'd grimaced horribly while she tried to kill his father. _

_Squall clenched his hands, standing his ground. He felt his nails bite into bare skin, carving crescent moons of red into pale flesh. He didn't wear gloves here, not in their special place, where he wanted to savor each satin scrape of hair, each milk velvet inch of skin that turned the stoic and heartless Squall Leonheart into the less rigid creature only Rinoa had really been able to coax free. _

_Fate was a cruel bitch indeed. Hadn't he just mentioned to Quistis earlier that night that he didn't dream about her anymore? And now here she was, thrust right in front of his face, mocking with her nearness, with the sincerity and love satiating those big gentle eyes. _

_Had it really only been earlier that night he'd talked to Quistis, or had their conversation occurred a century ago? Time tended to blur for him now, one day blending into another, until he wasn't sure whether he'd lived another hundred days or years. _

_'Living' was really just a relative term now, though. Oxygen still forced its way into his cinched-tight lungs, and he ate when his friends forced him to, going through his duties with the mechanical-limbed motions of an obedient robot. But he wasn't really 'living' anymore. _

_He hadn't really lived until she came along, and now he was dead again. His body just didn't understand that yet, the organs and the painful mass that was his heart just ticking loyally along, because he was far too young to just shut down and die naturally. _

_A tornado swirl of wind yanked a handful of petals from surrounding stems, and Squall leaned back as he received a face full of the aromatic offering. They smelled like memories and her clean-scented hair, and he instinctively hated them. _

_The sky above him was all wrong, perfect robin's egg blue and holding just a few flawless cloud blossoms, placed as strategically throughout the endless blue as though some master artist had created the entire scene. It should have formed a churning storm front above him, rumbling with the catastrophic sound of thunder, destroying everything around him with the deadly tongue flicks of its lightning bolts. _

_He was tired of standing, tired of waking up each morning with nothing to look forward to, tired of wondering why it had been her of all people. _

_But he kept standing, because he had nothing else to do, and some distant, obstinate part of Squall just wouldn't let himself go quite yet. _

_"Get out of her." he demanded coldly, past the lump in his throat. "Get out of her now, and leave me alone." _

_Rinoa's eyes closed, and a single tear slipped from the tangled net of her lashes down her cheek. "It's not her right now, Squall." she whispered, voice breaking. "I promise. I know I broke my last promise to you…to be with you for the rest of my life…but this promise is true, ok?" _

_He couldn't stand it anymore. He couldn't _fucking stand it_; how did anyone bear this? How did anyone expect _him _to bear it and just keep going, keep playing his war games and his role of imperturbable leader while all the while he walked with the leaden anchor of her absence dragging behind each step with its thousand pound persistence? _

_He couldn't keep doing it. He _couldn't_. _

_Squall felt his knees start to fold. _

_Her face clenched, and she rushed forward, the cheekbones he used to trace with his fingertips while she slept streaked with silent heartache. Rinoa caught him as he fell, and she felt…warm, soft, wonderful. _

_Almost real, but not quite, because he could sense the phantom consistency of her presence, insubstantial like cotton candy, so frail he wouldn't even touch her, because he couldn't stand to watch her dissipate into the same unseen breeze that caressed his scarred forehead. _

_"Squall!" she sobbed, hugging him around the shoulders. _

_"Why are you here now?" he asked dumbly. _

_She buried her face in the front of his shirt, voice muffled. "I don't know. I don't know, but I'm here, so will you please hug me? I've been afraid…she'd killed you or something." She hiccupped as she said it, sniffling against his chest. _

_"But it's not real." he whispered, fighting his burning eyes. _

_She pulled away and looked up at him, her face wet with tears that felt genuine enough when he shakily lifted a hand to the silken curve of one cheek and rested his palm there. Why did she have to feel so authentic? It would hurt that much more when this all disappeared--at least if she'd wisped around his fingers into the ghost mist of a dream, he could have reined in his emotions, sternly reminded himself that Rinoa was not kneeling in front of him, embracing him. "But it's all we have." she replied. _

It's not enough. _he thought, his stomach lurching. _It's not enough. I want to wake up and find you there for once. I'm tired of waking up alone. It hurts too much.

_"You don't know how hard it is…without you." he said, the words snagging in his throat. _

_The tender smile he missed so much curved her lips. "I do know, Squall." Rinoa whispered, lightly touching his scar. "But I want you to be happy. You have to keep going, ok?" _

_"How am I supposed to be happy? There's nothing to be happy about anymore." _

_"You still have our friends." she replied sadly, and his heart squeezed abruptly as he thought of how alone she must be, trapped somewhere deep inside her own body while a madwoman controlled her limbs. How horrible must that be? And yet here she was, comforting him. She was so damn brave, and he loved her so much it sent shockwaves of pain through his body. _

_"If you can get into my dreams again, then you're not completely gone, Rinoa. She hasn't won yet." _I can still save you. You have to keep your promise to me.

_"We tried before, Squall. You have to do what you need to. To save everyone, not just me." _

_"We missed something." he argued. "There's something we don't know, some way to defeat her without hurting you." _

_She shook her head, and that hurt more than anything. "I love you Squall." _

And he snapped upright in his chair, losing her and that perfect, picturesque meadow just like that, in one shattering moment that sapped all the breath from his body. He slumped behind his desk, dropping his head into his hands and grabbing frantically for his last threads of control. He was sitting in his office at 1:00 in the morning while everyone else slept soundly, with Zell vomit still clinging to his shoes. He would not add to the patheticness by crying like a baby into his shaking fingers.

_I love you, too, Rinoa. _

It came too late, but he hoped wherever she was she could somehow sense the strength of the emotion.

"Don't you ever get sick of cleaning Chicken Wuss puke off your clothes?" Seifer grumbled as Quistis quietly shut the door to her friend's room, her hair starting to come undone around her weary face and billowing down around her shoulders.

"You get used to it after awhile." she said tiredly. "At least he's finally asleep now."

"Yeah. It only took four hours and about fifty gallons of vomit to get him there, too. What a great night. I can't thank you enough for the opportunity to have so many suicidal thoughts."

"I would have imagined your thoughts running more along the lines of homicidal." Quistis replied as they walked down the hall back toward her own dorm, her shoes dangling from one hand by their dainty straps, her aching, blistered feet padding quietly along the hall's thin carpeting.

"Trust me, they went that way too more than once. Why does Wuss always manage to include nudity in his retarded stunts?"

"Just be glad it was only partial nudity this time. And at least there were no barnyard animals involved."

Seifer stopped walking while she continued on ahead, staring hard at her back. "What the hell?"

Quistis sighed. "Trust me, you don't want to know." She reached her own door and quickly disabled the door lock that had finally been repaired last week after Seifer so thoughtfully broke it, letting herself into the dorm's comforting silence and holding the door open for him to follow behind.

He peeled the latex coating from his scar as soon as the door was safely shut, cussing under his breath and rubbing excess flesh-toned makeup from his forehead. "It never gets easier wearing this shit. It's always hot and itchy and fucking annoying. If Chicken Wuss was an accessory, he'd be a strip of face plastic--uncomfortable, unnecessary, and irritating as hell."

Quistis looked mildly amused as she sank down onto her bed. "Well, I wouldn't say unnecessary. It does make you a little less renowned. But it was an interesting comparison."

"So how big a brick do you think Wuss would shit if he knew that his beloved 'Devon' was really his old friend Seifer back from the dead?"

"Ragnarok large." she responded dryly. "I'm going to take a shower."

"Ok." he said, throwing himself down on the spot she'd vacated as she disappeared into the bathroom, the door locking safely behind her with an audible click. He stretched out across her neat covers, rumpling them, tucking his hands behind his head and turning his gaze toward the ceiling, a faint smile touching his lips as he studied the cracks branching their destructive way through faded white plaster. He was surprised Quistis dared let such imperfections show themselves in her own bedroom.

The clanking of pipes and subsequent thunder of shower water kept him from slipping over the brink of exhaustion into actual slumber, and he laid there with his eyes half open until he heard the door lock pop, followed by the sound of the door itself squeaking open.

Seifer pushed up curiously onto one elbow to watch Quistis emerge from the bathroom, cheeks stained with the slight flush of embarrassment.

"I'm having trouble with the zipper on this. Can you help me?"

He smirked. "You want me to help you take off your clothes?"

She glared at him. "I just need you to unzip it far enough for me to reach it."

"Don't worry, Instructor." Seifer assured her, getting up and cracking his knuckles. "I'm really good at this."

She ignored that and turned around as he stepped into the steamy room, condensation beading along his forehead and upper lip, the moist swirl of shower mist like the warmly welcome embrace of an old friend. He nudged the door shut behind him with the heel of his foot to trap the heat inside, and reached for the offending piece of metal.

He could feel his heart pounding in his throat as he tugged on the stubborn zipper, each rough jerk of it rewarding him with another few inches of smooth white skin. The supple muscles of her back rippled enticingly, steel beneath silk as she craned her neck to try and see his progress.

"Hold still." Seifer ordered, a little more sharply than he'd meant to. He pulled the back of her dress completely open, trying not to pay attention to the glimpse of cotton panties that afforded him--just the waistband, but enough to significantly rouse his interest.

_"I know nothing actually…happened, but they still…touched me. I keep remembering that every time you…" _

_"I'm sorry, Seifer. I just can't…I'm not ready yet." _

She'd told him that only a few weeks ago, and he doubted she was now ready to rip off his clothes and fuck him dirty inside her shower, though if she made the offer, who was he to mess with the healing process?

She'd turned around while he fantasized, and was looking pointedly at him. "You can leave now."

"Yeah. Right." He reached for the door knob.

"Unless…you want to stay."

Seifer's mouth dropped open as he looked back over his shoulder at her. Holy shit. Had Quistis really just suggested that, or were his own fantasies bleeding through into reality? He hadn't really expected her to extend some sort of invitation, but when he turned slowly around to face her, he found her looking shyly at her feet, blushing helpless, dazzling red. Only Quistis could look so beautiful and so awkward at the same time.

"You need to shower too. It'll be quicker." she explained hastily. "Nothing else. Just…a shower."

_Blue balls! _the half-way intelligent part of him snapped. He snarled at the half-way intelligent part to shut the hell up, and took a step forward.

His hand lightly stroked the fair silk of her shoulder, then hesitated. Seifer made firm eye contact. "Are you sure?"

Quistis met his gaze finally. "Yes." she said quietly, and it was just a whispering exhalation of a reply, but it was resolved, certain, and it was enough.

He slid the dress straps slowly off her shoulders as Quistis reached back and unhooked her bra, the lacy material bowing out loosely around her chest and giving Seifer a glimpse of curved white skin. The bathroom's steamy heat slithered its way into his pores, beneath his clothing and into the golden fringe of his bangs, damp with condensation and plastered to his disfigurement. His pulse hammered frantically in the side of his neck, a relentless banging of the heart that she could see, the entire scene flash-frozen to the backs of Quistis' eyelids. It was an erratic and un-Seifer-like display of nerves, like the slight edgy twitch of his fingers where they curved over her shoulders, over the thin black spaghetti loops of her bra straps.

Seifer hooked his thumbs beneath those dark bands that formed the final barrier between him and her naked breasts, and, taking a deep breath, slid them free. His mouth felt too-dry in the heat of the small space, crammed with the abosrbant buds of cotton puffs, robbing all the moisture from the shriveled muscle the warmth made of his tongue. _Get a fucking hold of yourself, Almasy. _he ordered himself angrily. He was not some blushing virgin, and this was not the first time he'd seen a pair of nipples. This wasn't even the first time he'd seen _Quistis'_ nipples, although unlike this time she hadn't exactly been a willing participant in his last glimpse of them.

She flushed again and dropped her chin, looking shlyly down at the floor, at her tiny feet and conservative peach painted toe nails. Seifer lifted her jaw with a finger and gently kissed her, sliding his hands around her moist back as Quistis' dress fell and puddled between them.

He pulled back and slipped his shirt off, dropping it over her dress. Then, slowly, watching Quistis to make sure she was still ok with the progression of events, he unbuttoned his pants and kicked them off, standing in just a pair of navy blue boxers.

He was beautiful. Wrapped in the lean steel of a figher's muscles, his trim body crosshatched in the faded white and dull pink of old scar tissue, Seifer looked formidable, a warrior angel with the gold-dusted sheen of his hair and the authoritative fire of his malachite eyes. Quistis tentatively touched his chest with her palms, running one finger along the line of blonde hair bisecting his ridged abdominal muscles and disappearing under the waistline of his boxers. Seifer shivered and closed his eyes. She paused there, touching the soft material, hesitating, until he covered her hands with his and glided the clenched-tight knots of her fists down the front of his thighs, bringing his underwear with them.

Quistis ducked her head to hide the rising color in her cheeks, but he saw it anyway and laughed softly, a low-down rumble from his chest. "Still want to keep going, Instructor? Your face looks like it's about to explode. It's ok; I know it's an awe-inspiring sight."

And just like that, the tension of the moment snapped, like a bubble blown too big, and she crossed her arms over her chest with that infuriating, condescending teacher's look on her face.

Seifer grabbed ahold of her panties and yanked them down hard, eliciting a startled and uncharacteristic squeal from her. Quistis scrambled for the shower curtain, and Seifer chased her into the narrow stall while she yelled his name in her scolding instructor's tone and attempted to fend him off with sprays of lukewarm water from the detachable head.

It took him a while to wrestle it out of her hands, and when he finally did he turned her own weapon back on her, shooting a jet stream of water directly into her open, yelling mouth. His laughter filled the cramped bathroom as she sputtered, cut off abruptly by the thud of flesh on flesh and Seifer's yelp of pain. "Ow, fuck!"

Quistis glared up at him through dripping wet hair, and wedged her knee into a place that made him very nervous. "Hey! Dammit, don't do that, Quistis. Look, here; you can have your fucking shower head back."

"Thank you." she said calmly, accepting it graciously and then aiming its blast right at his face.

She spent a good minute dousing him while he cursed loudly and kept futilely trying to wipe water from his eyes, his glower holding less weight than usual while he stood naked and defeated by a woman only half his size armed with nothing but a piece of plastic spurting half-hearted bursts of water. Her water pressure held something to be desired, which he supposed was fortunate for him if he didn't want 'Here Lies Seifer Almasy. He Died Naked and Horny Trying To Seduce A Woman In Her Own Shower' engraved on his headstone.

He finally tore the damn thing out of her hands, let it go to swing wildly and bang against the shower wall a couple of times, and pinned Quistis by her wrists to the side of the stall. She slipped on the slick floor and nearly fell as he pushed her into submissive position; Seifer caught her around the waist as she stumbled forward into him, the collision of her bare wet breasts against his own chest expanding a nervous heat inside his stomach and his groin. He trapped her in the circle of his arms and froze like that, staring down into her uptilted face, sliding his eyes over those pretty lips, parted like they waited for him, and those shining indigo drowning pools, wide in her face of china doll paleness.

Seifer brushed a clump of wet hair from her right cheek, heart pounding again, his mind stuck on the jab of her hips where they pressed against his, on the dull ache that jarred the bones of his left forearm where her fingertips dug into the flesh, pain and pleasure all swirled into one dizzying moment of heady euphoria. He pressed his face into the side of her neck and hugged her against him, reluctantly letting go when he felt her tense.

Quistis wordlessly collected the abandoned shower head from where it dangled slackly down one wall, standing on tiptoes to clip it back into its notch and then adjusting the water temperature from tepid to searing. She used the blistering touch of it to scald images of naked Seifer from her mind, quietly shampooing her hair while he huddled in one corner trying not to look at her, struggling to forget how aroused he was.

Falling in love with Quistis really pissed off his dick.

* * *

An hour later, still frustratingly horny, damp, and smelling ever-so-faintly of the peach shampoo she used, Seifer perched in her computer chair and spun himself lazily around in it a few times, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do to take his mind off how badly he wanted to have sex with Quistis. It was almost 3:00 in the damn morning, which meant everything had been shut down a long time ago, with just the white noise hum of generators and snoring pupils to take his mind off his fantasies.

He caught a kaleidoscope glimpse of her as the chair finished its rotation and swung to a halt facing the door; he nudged it back around toward Quistis, looking at her hair arranged in its fan of wheat-gold ripples across her pillow and the knot of one fist folded under a moonlight cheek. Her long bare legs dangled off the edge of the bed, the red wine shimmer of her sheet falling horizontally across her torso to hide the nightshirt she wore, giving the illusion of nudity.

Which didn't help him much, but he kept staring anyway because he liked watching her sleep. She looked young and vulnerable, and it reminded him that she wasn't all ice and steel, cold derision and bookish dispassion. Seeing her like this shot tendrils of protectiveness through him, wrapping Seifer in the warm fleece of his desire to keep her safe. He was still getting used to that, used to the aspiration to defend instead of destroy, to save instead of beat down.

Funny how Quistis had changed him, when he'd always figured he was just eternally stuck in the role of nemesis and terrorist. He was forever the half-crazy asshole who'd nearly ended a world, forever the traitor trailing the ghosts of his failures and his crimes behind him. The burden of Ultimicea still squatted on his shoulders like a small, heavy child taken up permanent residence, but since Quistis the load felt lighter, like the fucker had finally lost a few pounds. He didn't know how one woman had done that alone, one mere human who didn't have a clue about losing control of your own mind and marching to the rhythm of someone else's drumbeat while inside you beat scraped-raw fists against the prison that was your mind and screamed helplessly into a void where no one could hear.

But Quistis had, and that awed him, when before anything that didn't involve his own cleverness or physical prowess failed to impress him.

She came awake as he smiled at her, fluttering her lashes indolently.

Quistis liked this smile. It was his genuine one, the one without bitter shadows and demon ghosts clinging to the curve of his lips. When Seifer smiled, he was beautiful. She would never tell him so aloud, because the adjective would piss him off, but 'handsome' was too flippant a word for the shining radiance of his features.

She knuckled slumber from her eyes. "Why are you still awake?"

_Probably because my dick keeps screaming at me to stick it in you. _"Just can't sleep." Seifer told her. Then, just to embarrass her, he added: "I'm distracted picturing your naked body."

As expected, Quistis blushed and sent a mild frown his way while he laughed at her. It was the nature of their relationship; he annoyed/embarrassed her, and she reprimanded him. It was a rapport Seifer was beginning to become comfortable with, because it reminded him slightly of their old teacher/student bond before the war, the pesky pupil trying his best to get a rise out of the frazzled instructor who just wanted him to exercise his immense potential. And although 'bond' probably wasn't the best way to describe their pre-Ultimicea interactions--she mostly just irritated him when he wasn't imagining her naked or giving him sexual favors on top of her desk--it was still a link he understood, one that reminded him that he had not always been some crazy bitch's little puppet. Back then he'd been Seifer fucking Almasy, feared and admired, not the fractured skeleton shell he was now.

Now he wasn't even supposed to be alive, and the young instructor who used to annoy the hell out of him with her prudish ways and adherence to rules made him want to burn the world all over again--but for her this time, if she needed him to, not because of his own ambitions.

Seifer laced his hands behind his head and rocked slightly back in her chair. "Let's go do something."

Quistis squinted at her alarm clock. "It's 3:15 in the morning, Seifer. Everything except the training center is closed."

"Well, let's sneak down to the cafeteria or something and steal all the hot dogs so there aren't any left for Wuss tomorrow." He snickered. "Five gil says he craps himself right in the middle of the lunchroom."

She rolled her eyes. "No thank you. I'd rather not reflect on the bowel movements of one of my friends, never mind putting money down on it."

"Fine. We could sneak down to the secret area and make out." Not that that would help his current aroused state either, but oh well. Screw it. He had a hand and, eventually, some private time.

"Or we could both go to bed."

"I'm leaning more toward making out, personally."

"And I, personally, find sleep a little more appealing at the moment."

"Ouch."

Quistis rolled her eyes again. "Your feelings are not hurt, Seifer."

He ignored that. "Let's hijack Garden and fly it down to the Island Closest To Hell."

She looked horrified at his suggestion, coming half off the bed with her hair swinging loosely around her shoulders. He waved her back down. "Holy shit, Quistis, relax. I was kidding."

Looking slightly annoyed, though she didn't know why, Seifer twirled the chair around and peeked out her blinds, across the silent sheet of dark glass Garden floated on. Then he reached for the string attached to her window and jerked sharply on it, tugging the blinds up rapidly enough to nearly blind Quistis, who blinked against the intrustion of red-gold light into her sensitive pupils.

"Fuck." Seifer blurted out, lurching to his feet.

Garden was on fire.

Ultimicea watched the next torpedo slam into the glowing exterior of the floundering Balamb Garden from her position at the warship's railing, and lifted her face into the cool breeze coiling off ocean water.

She could smell liquefied steel and death in that breeze.

Rinoa's lips flared into a sly smile, predator mean and ironic. It was too bad the black-haired bitch was still strong enough to break free of Ultimicea's domineering grip; she hadn't expected that, obviously underestimating the willpower of Squall's precious little princess, but in the end it helped the sorceress more than it hindered her. Rinoa hadn't been able to take back control of her body, and her brief adventure into Squall's mind allowed Ultimicea a peek as well, exposing a fleeting slide show scroll of images that she carefully pieced together into the patchwork quilt picture that was the location of Garden.

It took her a mere two hours to muster up an attack force and begin her assault.

She savored the fruit of her labors now, watching B. Garden flower into a million tiny rose buds of orange, blossoms of destruction that cropped up here and there like deadly weeds in the midst of a lovely backyard. The school's top levels poured acrid smoke, funnels of charcoal that billowed out in cloud banks of gunmetal gray across the star studded sky. The scent of her triumph nested in the dark strands of Rinoa's hair where they blew across her pretty face, a pungent perfume of massacre and demolition.

She smiled again, and leaned her elbows on the railing to eagerly watch.

The third torpedo launched from Ultimicea's fleet struck the west side of Garden, taking half the infirmary with it.

Bria was hunched in front of the medical center's computer irritably wondering why the hell she was still dating Zell when her sanctuary erupted around her in splinters of steel and wood, one entire side of the room just disappearing as though the hand of Hyne himself had reached down to pluck it from the main body, leaving behind the steel pipe and electrical wiring of its exposed veins.

She screamed as the hot blast of the explosion knocked her out of her chair, slamming her into a cart of medical supplies that overturned and showered her with a cascade of syringes and latex glove boxes.

Something meaty and wet struck her in the forehead, streaking its red slime trail down her face as it gradually slinked down her nose to splash noisily in her lap.

One of Dr. Kadowaki's hands, still holding the woman's favorite pencil in her callused fingers, petrified now into a rigid death spasm.

In the sealed-tomb quiet of the library, one diligent, insomniac SeeD wannabe sat leafing through a textbook covering the history of Guardian Forces, looking curiously up as the whistle shriek of incoming Galbadian RPG's ruined her studies, smashing through the elegant woodwork of the room's vaulted ceiling and transforming her face into tenderized meat.

The siren scream of alarms began to rouse groggy soldiers from their beds, pulling them from beneath warm bedcovers into early-morning cold.

Another missile strike against the east side of Garden destroyed a hefty section of dorms, blowing chunks of Irvine's room into the choppy sea as he was dressing. He swore and dove for cover as airships screamed past overhead, grabbing Exeter as he rolled behind his antique dresser.

From Squall's office, Garden's commander had a terrific view of the whole horrific situation, his cold lion's eyes fighting tears as he imagined Ultimicea using Rinoa to kill her friends and destroy the young woman's home. His hand tightened on Lionheart; through the smeared haze of his brimming eyes and the pulsating blazes that slowly consumed Garden, he could see a lone speck on the upper deck of Galbadia's lead warship. Too far away for his eyes to differentiate between dark sky and facial features, but he knew it would be her, gloating behind Rinoa's sweet face while she crushed them all.

Burning rage sheared a smoldering hole through the frigid core of his depression.

The window and a mile of ocean formed the only barrier between them. He broke the first with a precise swing of Lionheart and climbed onto the empty window frame, glass shards crunching beneath his boots.

Out here, he could smell the foul bitterness of the smoke rolling its killing shroud across his home, and the faint, faint fragrance of the flowers growing in the courtyard a few stories down, the ones that reminded him of her hair.

To Zell's alcohol-fogged mind, Garden's clamoring warning bells were only an unwelcome infringement on his sleep, just one more hammer beating home the heartbeat throb of his migraine. Then the hibernating soldier inside him came fully awake, and he sat bolt upright in bed, throwing his blankets off.

Through the slits of his half-closed blinds, he could see shadow dancers performing a hyperactive ballet outside his window. He ripped the shades off--destroying them in the process--to find himself confronted with the same sight Seifer had discovered only a few minutes ago; his beloved Garden in flames, her children dying in the smoke-poisoned wind blowing in off the ocean.

Selphie did not hear the warning sirens. Dive-bombing RPG's permanently stopped the happy dreams she escaped to that night, while half a Garden away Irvine scrambled half-dressed through rubble and bodies to save her.

Quistis hastily dressed as Seifer threw open her door and sprinted into the hallway before she could even scream for him to disguise himself again. She stabbed her legs through the closest pair of pants she could reach, threw on a shirt, laced her boots more swiftly than she could ever remember doing so, then chased after him.

Her whip, strung through a belt loop, slapped against her left thigh as she ran.

The hallway before him exploded--Quistis screamed as the blast uprooted sections of ceiling and floor, throwing them into the vast earthquake fissure that split the carpeted hall down its center.

_Oh Hyne no, please Hyne no…_

"Seifer!" Quistis yelled, forgetting to use his pseudonym in that moment of panic, of absolute certainty that he'd been right there as the attack blew apart the surrounding walls.

Then she heard him coughing, and her heart climbed its tedious way back down from her throat.

He emerged through a veil of dust, squinting at her through watering eyes, scar naked and powdered black over the fierce intensity of his gaze. "Yeah, we're not going that fucking way."

He grabbed her roughly by the arm as he passed, dragging her along behind him.

"We need to regroup, form a defense against the attack." she protested, trying to pry his fingers off her.

Seifer pulled her back into her room and pushed her in front of her window as he unlatched it.

"Seifer, what are you doing?" she demanded. "Squall will be on the intercom at any moment with orders--"

"Look out the window, Quistis. We're not fighting back. We have to evacuate."

She stood out of the way as he clambered up onto the window sill and then dropped to the ground below, extending a hand up to help her after him. She hung back, listening to the contents of her stomach gurgle anxiously inside of her, the acid that cushioned them chewing its way up toward her heart.

He was right; they wouldn't be defending their home when the time could be better spent escaping, not unless they wanted to die.

Garden was sinking.

* * *

Squall delivered only one tense, terse message to those still alive in the twisted ruin of Garden's burned-out hulk; for everyone to get themselves safely off the drowning academy and then go to ground as soon as they reached shore. They would be contacted later, once everything had calmed down and SeeD could safely regroup.

Not by him, though. He highly doubted he was walking away from this confrontation, because he had to finally do what he should have a long time ago, and if he succeeded he didn't want to live anymore. If he didn't he was dead anyway. Xu was capable and organized enough to pick up where Squall left off.

He said a silent prayer for his friends, took one of the water cycles from Garden's garage, put it into gear, and aimed himself toward the war ship carrying the woman he loved. Holstered at his side, Lionheart glinted silent promises of death in the amalgamated shimmer of firelight and the frosted illumination of the moon.

She tried not to cry as she struggled to unhook the tubes suspended between Squall's father and the machinery monitoring his vital signs while he recovered, but she did anyway, silent, searing tears while the memory of Dr. Kadowaki's death frozen hand scorched itself into her brain.

Bria's fingers shook as she worked. Laguna helped, moving with arthritic stiffness, his bumbling attempts to calm her ignored. She wasn't a fucking soldier, dammit, but she was stronger than this. Swallowing the painful bubble of the sob that tried to escape her throat, she ran an arm across her eyes and unsnapped the last I.V. line, tossing them all into a messy heap on the floor.

"Can you walk?" she asked, pleased to note that her voice didn't tremble nearly as badly as she would have guessed.

"Sure." Laguna assured her, his knees folding under him as he stood up. "Uh…I guess everything's a little stiff from lying down for so long. Just leave me here, ok? I'll get out ok."

Bria shook her head. "No. You're my patient. I wouldn't be taking very good care of you if I just left you to die."

They left together, he half-draped over her shoulders, she sagging under his weight and shuffling awkwardly along through the gnawed remnants of the main level's fountain, a glimmering corner of the elevator shaft peeking out from one dusty pile. Students poured from all exits, some panicked, others calmer, even more of them lying gape-mouthed and unmoving beneath Bria's feet.

She tried not to step on them, but she did anyway; there were just too damn many of them, and each brittle-leaf crunch of bone that snapped beneath her heels hunched her shoulders a little further, plummeted her stomach a little lower.

Among so much death and destruction, what were the odds that Zell had survived?

The thought jabbed a strange pain through her; it was coldly hot, numbingly agonizing, and so powerful it crushed her gut into a miniscule cube of whiplashed acid. She could feel that acid leaking through into the rest of her body, singeing her bones down to powdered ash piles.

She'd never really thought of losing him before; he was just always there, sometimes foolishly adorable, sometimes just plain annoying, but never gone.

If Zell was gone, who did she call after a bad day of too much pain and suffering, of too many soldiers fading quietly away beneath her gloved hands despite her best administrations?

She helped Esthar's president to the garage, dragging him along each excruciating inch, her shoulders screaming their displeasure.

She left him there in the hands of Administrator Xu, who was coolly directing traffic and dividing cadets up between vehicles, then fled back into the bowels of the doomed building.

It took Seifer a few moments to realize that Quistis was no longer behind him as he worked his way through the courtyard and back around toward the open bay doors of the garage.

"_Shit_," he snarled, crouching down behind a bush as a few students hurried past, tasting bile against his tongue. The fucking do-gooder was no doubt going to do her best to get herself killed helping underclassmen and her friends to escape, until that fatal moment when she lingered too long and ended up pancaked against a wall by one of Galbadia's missiles, her splattered intestines forming an intricate rat's nest around her blank-eyed body.

He couldn't stand that image.

Seifer got back to his feet and turned around, racing back his last few steps, looking wildly around in the hopes of spotting her. She couldn't have gotten that far in such a short time; he'd just been talking to her only a minute or so ago. If she weren't so damned altruistic, they could already be heading safely toward shore--what did she owe these people anyway? He hadn't seen any of them come back for her, to make sure their precious Instructor Trepe escaped ok.

No one gave a shit about anyone except themselves at a time like this. Quistis was stupid to think otherwise.

Two mild heart attacks later, his panic ratcheting up one notch and then another as the minutes flickered past, each tracked excruciatingly by his pounding heart, he still didn't see her.

Finally, half-ready to tear Garden apart himself with his bare hands, Seifer glimpsed a glitter of blonde kneeling beside a young cadet trapped under some debris, and took off running like hell as soon as he recognized Quistis' long hair and the gem flash of her blue eyes.

She was in the process of casting Curaga when he reached her, something she'd obviously tried a few times already without success, judging by the tears clinging to the corners of her eyes but obstinately refusing to fall.

"Hey." Seifer grasped her by the shoulder. "We need to go, dammit."

"No." Quistis shook her head, spine stubbornly ramrod straight, pulled taut in a way he knew he would not get around. "Not until I can make sure everyone is all right."

"There's a whole fucking school of people here, Quistis! You can't save everyone." he snapped, yanking her up onto her feet. "None of them give a shit about you, they're just worried about their own asses. You should do the same."

She pulled out of his grip and looked coldly at him. "Zell, Irvine, Selphie and Squall care. I can't just leave them here."

Who the hell cared about Chicken Wuss when Quistis was in danger? Seifer thought in frustration. But pointing that out to Quistis would just piss her off.

Before he'd loved her, he never would have done something so stupid as following the bull-headed Instructor Trepe back into a damned Garden listing more and more toward port She was smart, and a survivor; he'd have left her to fend for herself, and if she died, at least he'd endure no more lackluster speeches.

Now that woman was his whole life, and Seifer would leave with her, or go down with the whole damn place.

He could feel the breeze dragging its barbed ice hooks of cold down his back, and he could feel the salt spray of ocean poking stinging gouges into his cheeks.

But he couldn't feel his heart. Squall wasn't sure it existed anymore.

The water cycle he rode clocked out at a maximum 80 mph; he'd jammed the throttle all the way forward, hurtling in broad, long hops across the ocean's surface like a skipping stone, each touchdown jarring him off the seat. He clung with an athlete's toned thighs to the sides of it, holding on for dear life as the face clouded in that rotating halo of raven hair expanded in his vision.

It was her, just like he'd known it would be, and even with that woman at the controls of Rinoa's mind now, she still stole the breath from him.

Every ounce of it wheezed out of his chest as he drew his gun blade, slowing his vehicle slightly.

He lifted the heavy weapon with his right hand, using his other arm to steady it as the water cycle bounced beneath him. His naked fingers caressed achingly cold metal, and as his trigger finger crept to the slender curve of steel that would end her life, he felt his heart again, frozen stiff to the roof of his mouth.

He would do this for Garden, and for her. He was not murdering Rinoa, but setting her free.

_Don't do it. You can't kill her; she was the first person you ever really figured out how to love. _

His hand shook violently, like a frail old man's. How could he live after watching his bullet blow her smiling face apart into fragments of bone and brain? How the hell was he supposed to sleep at night, watching her beautiful cheeks shatter and fly apart over and over again?

_Do it. You're the one who has to stop this. She wanted it to be you; she said it was ok if you did it, remember? So do it. Pull the damn trigger. This is what she wants. _

Squall felt the wind slam frigid nails into his pores. It pulled his face tight, scratching tears from his eyes that he wasn't entirely sure were cold-induced.

Behind him, another explosion rocked Garden, and a new flare of crimson-tangerine light backlit his drifting form.

She was close enough now for him to see the smile on her face.

But it wasn't her smile anymore, so he clamped down on that curve of steel, and shut his eyes as Lionheart recoiled in his hand. The boom of gunfire hurt his ears, but it damaged his heart worse as Squall listened to it impact.

**A/N: For those of you who remember far enough back to the prologue and are thinking that Selphie's death seems out of place with the general plotline, don't worry, it's not. You'll understand further on.**


	22. Chapter 21

**A/N: See, I haven't forgotten about this story, I've just had hardly any time to write. Glad I finally carved out a few hours to devote to it, though, because I really missed this story. Hope you enjoy.**

**Chapter Twenty One**

Ground Level

Balamb Garden

Zell barreled into the main level screaming her name.

He saw the burned out shells that were the skeletally crisp remains of unfortunate students, and he saw the blind-frosted eyes that were death's macabre trademark all around him--but he didn't see her.

It scared the shit out of him. It was like stepping over the edge of a cliff--a cliff with its bottom thrusting its razor pinnacles of stone straight toward the vulnerable, wild-bird flutter of the heartbeat in his heaving chest. It was the knowledge of what awaited at the end of a terrifying plunge, and it was the terrifying plunge itself--endless, a forever torment that delivered only panicked anticipation but never the bone crunch of split second relief.

_She wasn't here. She wasn't here, and what the hell was he supposed to do? _

"Bria!" Zell hollered again, kicking aside debris, unearthing more horrors. A hand here, a singed bald head there, a pair of lips moving in silent, black flaking supplication in the face of a young man who would not be alive much longer.

He wanted to throw up. His stomach roiled, splashing into his throat, but he forced it back down. Puking his guts out didn't help him find Bria. It didn't make her any more alive or dead, and it wouldn't save any of his friends from fates similar to the ones suffered under the rubble of Garden's main level.

"Bria!"

He heard the clattering of boot heels over wreckage, the thunder-loud whistle of panicked breathing, and swung around, his mouth parting around her name--

To find Irvine sprinting toward him, Exeter swinging wildly at his right side, hair flowing down and loose around his shoulders, bare-chested and wearing only one boot. "Zell! Zell!"

The short blonde slammed into his taller friend, grabbing him hard around the waist. "Bria's--I can't find--is Quistis…the others…are they ok? Shit! Can you believe this?! Everyone's dead!"

Irvine hugged Zell back for a moment, crushing the other man's shoulders between the strength of his leanly muscled arms. He looked deathly pale when Zell pulled away, his face with its big beautiful eyes startlingly vulnerable with the head bare and the hair streaming free of its usual ponytail. "I don't know. I haven't see any of them. Have you seen Selphie?"

"No. She wasn't with you tonight?"

"No, she stayed in her own dorm tonight." That wasn't unusual--he was a nightowl, she an early riser, so she often chose to return to her own room to turn in early. But Hyne--on this night of all nights, why hadn't she just stayed when he asked her to?

The entire side of Garden where Selphie's dorm resided had been peeled away, like the hand of an enraged Hyne had reached down from the heavens and ripped it free. He could see the ragged edges and crumpled steel of devastation from here, and his heart wadded his throat like cotton, soaking up every ounce of saliva.

She might be dead. Or lying beneath some serrated dagger born from the disrupted steel beams that formed the framework of Garden, gasping out her final gurgling breaths--

It hurt so much he could barely stand it.

Looking at Zell's chalky features, Irvine knew that his friend understood exactly the anxiety cramming itself through the too-narrow confines of his veins, jamming its way into blood-choked alleyways far too small for the thundering tsunami of his emotions. If he stood here one more moment not knowing, picturing her petite smiling face carved into the meaty red tiger stripes of a million lacerations, he would explode.

"Bria!" Zell shrieked beside him, looking like he wanted to cry.

Irvine had passed the infirmary on his way into the central courtyard and seen the mangled destruction for himself. It had been late--or early, really, so maybe Bria was safe inside her own dorm on the far side of Garden, but judging from the young woman's work habits, Irvine doubted it.

His heart burned down to ash for his friend. Not seeing Selphie--not holding her in his arms and reassuring himself that she was fine, that the horrible sensation in his gut that felt like pieces of his stomach lining being stripped away was just unfounded fear--killed Irvine.

But his friend was falling apart right in front of him, his cries growing increasingly frantic as he struggled his way through the slick battlefield Galbadia's missiles had made of Garden's courtyard.

So Irvine followed, yelling a promise of help that probably fell on deaf ears, Exeter trembling in the earthquake shudder of his white-knuckled fingers.

She was right in front of him. _She was right fucking in front of him--_

And then suddenly she wasn't.

And Seifer found himself standing alone in the blood-soaked debris that had ended the lives of nearly five dozen cadets so far, wondering why he loved a woman stupid enough to run blindly back into the smoky hell of a sinking deathtrap.

He yelled her name, once, twice. "Quistis!" _Fuck. _"Quistis, dammit!" The syllables wrenched the stripped raw incline of his throat, and the oily black cloud banks shrouding Garden in their acrid veils clawed tears from his eyes. _No one's looking for you. _he'd assured her. _No one gives a shit, Quistis. They're just trying to save their own asses. _But he'd lied to her, and they both knew it. Her friends would not leave without ascertaining her welfare, without doing everything in their power to ensure Garden's most coveted, stubborn teacher survived.

But it wasn't Chicken Wuss, or the cowboy, or the irritating Messenger Girl or even Puberty Boy himself that Seifer gave a shit about--he didn't want to kill them anymore, and a part of him might even mourn their passing a little--but if he had to sacrifice every single one of them to save his former instructor, he would slaughter them all with his own bare fucking hands.

She could never really understand that, because he knew--even if she really did love him and this wasn't some complicated delusion Seifer had conjured for himself--Quistis would never let one of her precious Orphanage Gang die even if it meant losing him. It was partly why he loved her--there was only black and white for Quistis, never the gray in-between of maybes and what-ifs, just brutal reality, and while he couldn't really understand that, Seifer could marvel at it. She would go on saving people even if it meant sacrificing herself or even him for the greater good, and he…

He wanted to burn Galbadia's warships from the fucking skies, just for her, even if they crash-landed on top of Garden's newest recruits, twelve-year-old children just barely into puberty.

He coughed and covered his nose and mouth with one arm. "Quistis!"

The hideous screech of falling metal and the cut-short scream of a woman whipped his head around to the left. "Quistis? Dammit, fucking answer me!" His heart was about to explode from his fucking chest in its cocoon of bloody meat, just barely containing the fierce hammerbeat of the organ below, and she couldn't even fucking _say one word_, anything, just to let him know she was all right. "Quistis! _Quistis_!" The smoke and his panic formed a united front to tease cold fingers through the stress line fractures of his voice, cracking it wide open.

Seifer squatted down, dropping to the balls of his feet, lowering himself beneath the pall of smoke coiling lazily through the ruined husk that was Balamb Garden.

He didn't hear the woman screaming anymore, and because he didn't know whether that was a good or bad thing, or whether the frightened shriek had even belonged to Quistis, part of him wanted to die. Just honest-to-Hyne shrivel up into fetal position and let the sea close its slimy black palm over his head, fisting his brain and his lungs in its heartless steel fingers until everything just leaked out into choppy ocean waves in one fluid river of pulverized internal organs.

_Shut up. _he snarled to himself. _You are not a fucking pansy. _

He'd tear Garden apart looking for her. And if they'd fired their killing steel into her precious, pretty face, if they'd taken her from him like that long before he was ready to give her up, he'd die ripping their murder weapons from the skies. With his bare hands, if need be.

"_Quistis_!"

"Seifer?"

He staggered back to his feet. "Where the hell are you?"

"SEIFER?"

The first utterance of his name was unrecognizable, unusual in its timidity, but the second sent his heart into convulsive stop and start bursts of motion. "Fuujin?"

She came striding through the gray fog of his surroundings, limping along, dragging something heavy behind her. He'd seen her only rarely in the past few months, just passing glimpses--in all honesty, Seifer hadn't thought much about his old posse with everything else going on in his life.

Seeing her now melted something inside his gut. She was still the fierce tigress with her iron-clenched jaw and her silver comma mark of hair falling over the familiar black eye patch, steel vertebrae propping her upright to the very end, even weighted down with her enormous burden.

It was Raijin she dragged behind her, Seifer's stuttering mind processed a few moments later. She held him by an ankle, sweating and grunting with each excruciating tug, silent tear streamers tracing fluid lines of glittering diamond over her proud, ash-streaked face.

She looked beautiful right then, like the shining puddle of an oasis appearing before a man lost for days in the desert, and it struck him like a knife wound to the gut just how much he'd missed them.

Then he saw how still Raijin was, and his heart thudded onto the floor near his boots.

She stumbled, and he saw her hand--slick with perspiration and blood--slip from the enormous dark band that was their friend's ankle. His leg bounced with a raw meat thud to the floor, and Fuujin collapsed forward onto her knees, sides heaving like an animal run down to its last reserves.

Seifer crouched in front of her, afraid to look at the motionless figure lying behind her. "Is he alive?"

"YOU." she gasped. "HOW…?"

"Fuuj!" Seifer snapped. "Is Raijin fucking alive?"

"YES. MAYBE NOT FOR LONG THOUGH."

Seifer tried to swallow the icy lump of his heart, but it stuck in his throat, congealing around the gasping cavity that was his windpipe until he could barely breathe. "So, what? You were just going to keep fucking dragging him along until he died?"

She scowled at him. "STOP YELLING."

A funny command, coming from her.

Seifer moved at last toward the immobile pile that was a man who'd once been his best friend. His eyes gelled shut by leaking blood, a head wound open and gushing eerie banners of scarlet down his cheeks, Raijin looked beaten, defeated, and nothing made sense to Seifer anymore. This was fucking _Raijin_, who bulled along through life simply running over anyone who got in his way, their more scrawny forms bouncing off the barrel chest that rose and fell in shallow, halting breaths now. He didn't fall. He didn't lie in the bombed rubble of a dead building holding the singed rag doll bodies of his comrades, barely clinging to life himself.

The ex-knight's gaze stung. He waved smoke away from his face, cursing, knuckling his eyes and trying to breathe through the squeezed-tight entryway that was his throat.

Fuujin laid a hand on his arm. "We missed you." she whispered, and her voice was not its usual harsh siren call now, but a thread of a whisper that crawled its way through his ears and raveled itself tight around his brain.

Seifer stared down at the carved ebony of Raijin's features, saying nothing.

The bloody eyes flickered, introducing a thin strip of glistening brown. "Seifer? I heard your voice, ya' know, but I didn't really believe it."

His friend had never sounded this hoarse, this…weak. This was not the fading shell of Raijin breathing out his last death gasps beneath the hand Seifer laid gently on the large man's granite solid shoulder.

He knuckled his eyes again. "Fucking smoke." Then he scowled down at his friend. "The fuck's wrong with you? She can't drag your fat ass all the way through Garden."

"Sorry, Fuuj." Raijin apologized. "Can't move my legs, ya' know?" he said to Seifer. "Think I might be paralyzed. Scares me, ya' know, Seifer. I don't want to live like this."

Seifer was horrified to realize he was crying. It was just a subtle sheen across the eyes, but it burned like a poker shoved through a fire pit, and he wondered if Raijin noticed. Distantly, he felt the impact of another missile, felt Garden's subsequent shuddering around him, his fingers fisting into a tightly clenched knot against the blood-streaked floor.

"DON'T TALK LIKE THAT." Fuujin snapped.

"It's true." Raijin argued, and then he began to sob, the wrenching convulses of his upper body traveling down and flaring out into the dead meat lumps of his useless legs.

They sat there crying together, three of the toughest, hardest students Garden had ever seen, Seifer doing so silently and praying it was assumed that the smoke was simply bothering his eyes, Fuujin looking off into the distance weeping fat, soundless drops onto her friend's large chest, and Raijin with his gasping sobs that tore another chunk from Seifer's gut each time they emerged.

Seifer knuckled his streaming eyes once more, said "Fucking smoke," and then buried his face in his hands.

She retraced her steps after reaching a dead-end, her journey blocked by debris too thick to continue through, her heart beating frantically in its cage of bone while she pictured her friends dying the horrible deaths she witnessed all around her.

It took a century, two centuries, even, to sprint back the way she'd come, into the dying heart of Garden, whip clenched in the sweating vise grip of her hand.

Quistis stopped dead in her tracks when she rounded a corner and saw them sitting around him, Fuujin's head bowed, Seifer's clutched in the spastic death grab of his hands, and Raijin's sitting in the expanding red oil slick of his own blood.

Seifer's shoulders were shaking. She took in the whole scene, the despair on the faces of Seifer's former posse members, the metallic scent of blood and the faint bitter resonance of death that hummed somewhere in her mind, like a demon's smug opus…and the hitching jerk of his shoulders was the only thing she came away with, the smeared watercolor that painted itself on the backs of her eyelids in hues of throbbing crimson and opaque steel. The sight of him hunched in on himself like that, hiding the proud, arrogant face in the callused fans of his palms seemed off somehow, an out-of-focus photograph that forced Quistis to squint to make out details.

She heard Fuujin thunder "STOP TALKING LIKE THAT!" to the man lying on the floor, the rough voice piercing her ear drums and cutting through the fog of her brain.

"Shut up." Seifer snarled at them both, snatching his face from his hands, blinking furiously through the moisture coating it. "Shut the fuck up. You," he snarled, jabbing a shaking finger toward Raijin, "get the fuck back on your feet."

"I can't, Seifer." the big man sobbed. "I can't walk! Just leave me here, ya' know?"

Quistis' heart twisted itself into complicated loops inside her chest. Her blood was the out-of-control vehicle plummeting down the roller coaster spiral of her heart, and she felt like throwing up as she watched him, climbing furiously to his feet now, screaming profanities like the utterance of four-lettered words would somehow grant his friend the ability to walk again.

"Get up! _Get up_!"

Another impact nearby drowned Quistis' shout beneath the the choking spray of a rising dust plume and the booming echo of the missile carving away its next piece from the floundering Garden. "Seifer!"

He heard her anyway. His head snapped around toward her, his mouth parting around a hissed "Where the _fuck _have you been?" his face all stern lines and harsh anger--and then she was holding him up as his knees folded under him, like muscle and bone had dissolved into water, his fingers winding themselves into the front of her shirt.

Quistis heard him begging her to make that 'fat fuck get back up,' and the bile flavor in her mouth grew stronger.

"_I can't_!" Raijin screamed again, sobbing harder.

"Get up! _Get the fuck up_!"

"_I can't_!"

It was a horrible volley, a vicious back and forth of screams and garbled cries. Quistis hugged his face into her neck until he shoved her away, swinging around toward his friends, another nearby attack rolling the whole floor beneath them with a deafening rumble and throwing Qusitis to her knees.

"Seifer!" she yelled, struggling back to her feet, his strong back disappearing into a swirling dust cloud. Steel framework groaned and shrieked around her; the whistle blast of a direct hit right in front of her exploding stinging shrapnel sprays of wood and metal through the air like miniature missiles themselves. She felt a few bury themselves inside her, one in the top of her left shoulder, another in her left calf, jagged slivers that burned on impact.

Quistis charged forward into the chaotic miasma of her surroundings, and nearly tripped over Seifer, crouched on the floor holding one of Raijin's wrists in his hand.

Her whip slid through slack fingers.

Raijin had taken the brunt of the shrapnel, deadly splinters turning his throat into the bloody meat of a butcher's tenderized beef display. Fuujin kneeled on his other sider, her rough soldier's hand gently shutting her friend's empty death stare.

Seifer squatted like that for a long time, not saying anything, not even moving, a statue frozen into the anarchic storm that was the falling wreckage and far-off death moans all around them. Quistis could feel the slant of Garden tilting even farther toward the ocean as greedy waves began to swallow it, but the fear of drowning was just a remote prickle in her brain, just a slight annoyance like a thorn that has made its way into a sock.

His legs straightened beneath him after an eternity, and he loomed over her, the lasers of his eyes scorching holes into the back of his skull. "Sorry, Quistis." Seifer told her, and he did actually look sorry, for perhaps the first time in his life, strained contriteness pulling his scar tight against the flesh of his brow.

His fist flashed out, before she could even think to stop it.

Bloodless white knuckles were her last image before starbursts of white collided against one another in her head, the deafening rush of blackness that blasted through her brain a moment later the calamitous waterfall that carried Quistis off into the stagnant pool of unconciousness.

Seifer stood over her crumpled body for a few seconds, rubbing his knuckles and feeling sick.

_You used to try and kill her all the time, and now you feel like puking your guts out just because you punched her? _a mocking voice snarled at the back of his head. It was not her voice for once, but the rough bray of Bad Seifer, the Seifer who went beyond nasty bullying into the kind of evil acts he'd committed under the influence of Ultimicea, acts he'd sometimes wondered about, if they'd really been all her fault, or if a part of him had delighted in them, taken joy in his capabilities once the shackles of self-control had snapped.

Maybe Ultimicea's possession had been like alcohol consumption; you did things you wouldn't normally do when sober, not because you didn't want to do them, but because your inhibitions were still intact. Ultimicea might have just been the liqueur that stole his inhibitions.

Bad Seifer didn't say much anymore, but he was still there, still a rotten seed sprouting its decomposing roots into the ex-knight's gut, telling Seifer things he wasn't interested in anymore. Bad Seifer suggested all the things that could be done to his former instructor, lying there so innocent and helpless, and Seifer crouched down next to her.

During the war, he probably would have followed Bad Seifer's advice; slit her throat, cut open her stomach and tied her intestines into a hangman's noose around her delicate throat. The Seifer Quistis had coaxed back to the surface felt his stomach roll at the ideas.

Very gently, he scooped her up into his arms, and kissed the point of her jaw where he'd struck her, inhaling her scent.

He could still smell the faint peach bouquet of her shampoo, clinging to his nostrils, an olfactory memory to drive away the stench of gore and guts and death.

Ten minutes later, with a silent, stiff-backed Fuujin beside him, Seifer personally delivered Quistis into the arms of an astonished Xu, and then, alone, he clambored aboard one of the last remaining water cycles, and shot off across the sea toward Galbadia's nearest ship.

* * *

Squall's bullet impacted Rinoa/Ultimicea with the musical _ping _of a fingernail against mirror glass.

She turned her head and Rinoa, _his _Rinoa, the black-haired goddess who for some Hyne only knew reason had decided to give him the time of day, looked straight at him, and every muscle in his body pooled into slack uselessness.

And then the illusion was gone, and she was just the sorceress again, with her defensive rainbow prism shield of magic shimmering out of view once more.

Behind him, Garden continued to die, and he could do nothing but sit on his puttering vehicle, his weapon extended before him like the accusing finger that is all show and no substance, talk with no bite. He could feel cold ocean spray slicing little nicks into his skin, the salty liquid a briny acid under his flesh, inserting its molten tines of pain into his cheekbones the same way her eyes scalded him down to the bone.

Her ship was closer now, near enough to touch, and Squall wondered for one fleeting moment if it would simply run him down, chop his water cycle into insignificant flotsam the same way it ripped apart his body as it rolled its gargantuan steel belly over his frail skull.

He heard the approaching whine of a vehicle similar to his own first, and then the angry shout: "Leonheart, get the fuck out of the way!"

It was a cry nearly lost beneath the shattering whistle of torpedos and the gut-wrench boom of bombs killing his home and his friends, but the voice was sharp enough to jam its harsh little fishermen's hooks into his ears, whipping his head around to locate the source of the yell.

Some buried instinct of his--left over from years of military training where he'd been conditioned to simply react and not think--made Squall hit the accelerator on his vehicle, and the sudden burst of speed popped its nose up out of the water, its wet-slap landing throwing foam into the air. He turned the water cycle in a hard circle that brought him around to face the direction he'd come--back toward a burning, smoking Garden, the sight of it reducing his own heart to cinders, and a wrathful Seifer Almasy, screaming toward him at full speed on his own water cycle, the expression on his face reminding Squall of the war; feral, the lust of violence laid in a fever-bright sheen over his eyes, his teeth the clenched-tight snarl of a rabid woodland animal.

Someone was going to die today at Seifer's hands, Squall realized. His heart curled into a shriveled little mass inside his chest--_something had happened to Quistis_--he thought, and the knowledge sent debilitating shockwaves of pain through him. There was nothing else the ex-knight cared about more now--and the sadistic desire in his eyes shadowed something darker, the same unbearable pain that crushed Squall's chest down into the miniature sphere that attempting to kill Rinoa made it into. It is the excruciating agony of losing something that is your whole life, of holding in your hands something so infinitely precious just touching it scares you--only to drop it in one cataclysmic moment where you must watch in slow motion while it shatters into a million pieces on the floor at your feet.

"Stop!" Squall yelled, tasting vomit as Seifer lifted Hyperion, the deadly, shiny point aimed straight at what used to be Rinoa. "You can't hurt her."

"Doesn't mean I can't try." he snapped, and fired.

The blast echoed painfully in Squall's ears.

Seifer's bullet ricocheted harmlessly off Ultimicea's shield, skipping off somewhere over the water like a casually tossed stone. Snarling, the sorceress' former bodyguard squeezed the trigger again and again, like somehow one of those bullets might finally find that one flaw in the perfection of her spell, chisel through the one crack in the flawlessness of her iridescent soap bubble armor. Behind the deceptively fragile interlacing webs of color, she laughed at him.

And Seifer snapped.

Squall watched him unscrew the cap on his gas tank in confusion, his nostrils just barely curling against this new unpleasant odor rising up to join the smoke tainted skies.

He thought suddenly that he might have a guess as to what Seifer was about to attempt, and Squall's lips flapped open around a warning shout--it never left his mouth, his gut shrink-wrapping around his spine as he watched in horror the flaming amalgamation that collected in Almasy's hand.

It wasn't a pure Fira spell, but some kind of hybrid of Thundara and Fira with its tongues of blue and orange tangling together in a perverse lover's dance, shooting the sparks of their collaboration across Seifer's squinting eyes like falling stars.

"Seifer, don't!" Squall screamed, finally freeing his tongue. This wasn't what Quistis would have wanted--and oddly enough, it wasn't what he wanted either. Seifer could have his knight's death, his romantic flame of glory that people talked about for centuries--but not this way, not when their was no guarantee the flaming rocket he was about to turn his water cycle into would even puncture the hull of Ultimicea's ship, not when there wasn't any sure chance of it causing damage. It was futile, and stupid, and reckless, and incredibly Seifer.

It would kill Quistis--if by some miracle she were still alive--if Squall let Seifer do this. It would rip her apart, the same way the gaping hole left by Rinoa's absence shredded itself a little wider each day, and he couldn't let her suffer like that.

He'd spent a few afternoons with Rinoa practicing magic, and though he wasn't nearly as proficient as she, of course, he'd picked up a few tidbits here and there. His mind conjured nullify now to cancel out the effects of Seifer's spell before he could cast it, but before he could release the magic someone else beat him to the punch, a bright fireball arking downward from the ship's surface to spread in a fireworks explosion of gingery red over Seifer and his water cycle. The impact of the spell jerked the ex-knight from his seat and slammed him into the water; the greedy waves closed over his head, and Squall didn't see him again.

A moment later his own world turned dark as something hit him as well, and Squall hurtled into the starless night sky that was unconciousness.

* * *

_She watched him topple sideways into the flame-painted waves behind the prison of her own eyes._

_Rinoa gouged chunks from Ultimicea's control like an enraged lioness. In life she'd been more princess than warrior despite her brief stint as a revolutionary, more sunshine and smiles and stupid, petty shopping trips than soldier. _

_But that was the man she loved sliding flaccid-limbed and unresponsive into the restless waves, and the expanding fireball of rage ate away her heart as she watched him sink. _

_Ultimicea laughed at her attempts._

_She was not a lioness; just a kitten, flailing away at a ball of string. A nuisance and nothing more. _

_But even kittens sheath needle-sharp claws and teeth behind the fluff and innocence that is the trademark of baby animals everywhere, and it was these teeth and claws that Rinoa sank deep with, such tiny, insignificant feelers of her fading presence that shouldn't have even mattered. _

_But they did, and Ultimicea jerked in shock. _

_Rinoa shredded holes through the sorceress' very existence, ripping a gaping fissure into Ultimecia's soul. The sorceress gasped and stumbled against the ship's railing, folding in on herself._

_The steel vise of Rinoa's determined fingers snapped her spine upright once more. One palm unclenched from the sweaty-fisted knot it formed against the railing's serpent slick exterior, flexing experimentally. _

_Ultimicea stared in horror as the body that was not hers took itself back, dissipating into insignificant powder beneath the fierce wrecking ball that was the fury of Rinoa Heartilly. _

Rinoa collapsed onto her knees as she felt herself jolt violently back into control. It was a disconcerting sensation, like being thrown abruptly and unexpectedly into a raging ocean, killing waves closing over and over the head until the surface was no longer discernible through black water.

She gasped like a beached fish for a moment, too astonished and frightened to revel in her triumph, too shell-shocked for those first few seconds of her rebirth to do anything except kneel and tremble, one creamy delicate hand fisted against her mouth.

She could feel wind on her face, and the heat of distant burning fires--not just the muted echoes of breeze scratching itself over Ultimicea's arms, or the far-off memory of the furnace heat of sunlight, but real sensations, the sea digging its channels of briny pain through her cheeks and across the backs of her hands, tasting like teardrops on her lips as she slowly lifted her head.

The crow's banner of her hair touched her cheeks, not Ultimicea's, not the stolen crescents of moonlight that comprised her cheekbones, but Rinoa's.

The flaking ashes of her heart snapped the young sorceress from her reverie, and she jerked to her feet, crying Squall's name.

The ocean was a frothing battlefield of foam-capped waves and burning flotsam, its mirror glass surface the curdled window pane of a church's stained glass windows now, lit by the pulsing cherry-glow of her home as the flames of war slowly devoured it.

"Squall!" Rinoa screamed again, the brittle ashes of her heart coalescing once more just to break apart into a million pieces. "_Squall_!"

Two heads broke the roiling surface just a few feet from the bow of the ship she rode, and frantically she squinted down toward them, tumultuous waves and her own blurring eyes thwarting her efforts to make out the figures' identities. She could see dark hair plastered in raven strands against a scarred forehead she knew as well as her own, Garden's commander holding the other man up in his arms, the faded wheat of his slicked-back hair reminding her of Seifer's hair during that one summer they'd spent together, when they'd discovered their own secret hiding places and swimming holes they'd promised would belong only to them.

"Squall! _Squall_!" Rinoa screamed, the panicked calls changing now into something akin to joy, the smile that lit her face now entirely her own.

She swung herself over the railing, and as Galbadian vessels continued to fire their weapons into the heart of the dying Garden, she leapt without hesitation into the boiling ocean.

Squall swallowed some of the seawater that had smashed consciousness back into his limp body, tightening his hold on the sagging deadweight in his arms that was Seifer Almasy.

The man's stillness was unnatural. He'd never known Seifer to hold this motionless for so long…ever. Even in sleep he'd thrashed and fought like the wild animal he sometimes became, battering off invisible enemies while a wailing Zell screamed for Matron to make Seifer stop kicking him.

Worse even than the almost peaceful quiescence, Squall couldn't find the caged bird flutter of a pulse beneath the ex-knight's slippery wrist--it might have just been the waves, yanking his hand from its shaking exploration for some sign of life, or it might…

It might have just been that he no longer had a pulse.

The thought pushed cold fire into Squall's throat, its chill an unnatural burn that scorched the withered husk that was his tongue, glued to the roof of his mouth and utterly useless, the same way he felt at that moment.

"Seifer." he said sternly, like his authoritative Commander's voice could peel the clumped lashes from where they gathered against the purple crescent moon shadows beneath his eyes.

He didn't want Seifer to die.

It was odd, but floating there in flame-splattered waves with his home burning behind him and his former enemy cradled in the stretched-taut sinews of his arms, it was suddenly the only thing Squall could think of. He didn't want Seifer to die, almost as much as he didn't want to hear _her _voice emerging from Rinoa's pretty mouth anymore.

He wondered what Seifer would think of that, if his sneer of contempt wouldn't hold quite so much malice anymore, or if Squall's grudging respect for his old rival simply wasn't returned.

"Squall!"

That was _her _voice now, not Ultimicea's, and it was the single purest, most beautiful sound he'd ever heard, like the voice in an angel's choir that stands out above the rest.

He snapped his head around to see her swimming toward him, and that was her smile too, beaming radiantly at him, lit from within by so much love and joviality that even the weight in his arms didn't seem like such a burden anymore.

"Rinoa?" he stammered, and her hands stopped his stuttering questions, framing his face between the pale fans of her fingers, her lips kissing him over the top of Seifer's bowed head. These were not the hazy dream lips of his fantasies--these were real, cold and salty and fragile and firm and incredibly precious all at the same time--Squall treaded water in stunned silence while she embraced him, just barely remembering to hold onto the soggy handful of Seifer's shirt that he clutched tightly.

"She's gone, Squall. I beat her." Rinoa whispered, pulling back to rest her forehead against his.

_No. _a voice at the back of his head warned him. Nothing was ever so simple, especially not in his life. Miracles did not simply appear--or if they did, they certainly never involved him.

But it _was_ Rinoa's touch sending his skin into spasms of pleased shivers, her smiling lips that turned the core of ice that froze over his soul into a raging column of fire. He knew the fingers gently combing wet bangs from his blinking eyes, and he knew the lips that lovingly grazed the curve of his neck--he would always know them, probably even if he were dead. There was no mistaking the weight of her head against his shoulder, and there was no mistaking the way the most base part of him strained toward her, as if she were the sun and he a malnourished plant seeking light.

"Are you sure?" Squall whispered, too scared to hope. He hadn't made any room for hope for the last several months, and thought his body might outright reject the unfamiliar sentiment like rotten food expelled from a sensitive stomach.

Behind them, the fireworks glow of death continued to kill their home, and her face contorted in agony. "I'm so sorry, Squall. I didn't mean to do it." The words dripped from her mouth like acid, like poison, burning a hissing trail of pain down her chin as they slid over it and sloughed off her skin to climb into the sky, nestling into their lover's arms of smoke and death screams.

"You didn't." Squall assured her hoarsely, the same knot that always congealed in his throat whenever she was hurt twisting there now, siphoning his air down to one single emaciated strand of oxygen. It clawed his throat as it entered, acrid with smoke and the choked-back sting of tears. "That wasn't you, Rinoa."

"But look at me now. I stopped her; I took me back. I should have done it earlier. I could have, couldn't I?"

He didn't know, but Hyne he wished he did, because that plaintive question shredded his heart as resolutely as flying shrapnel filleted the screaming bodies of Garden's remaining inhabitants.

She looked at Seifer with her soft eyes, and reached over to gently stroke wet bangs from his shut-tight lids. It didn't awaken the inferno of pent-up jealousy the gesture would have once; it was a motherly brush of the fingers, the iridescent shimmer of tears clinging to her lashes the sorrowful beads of regret and not grief over the loss of a former lover. "Did I kill him?" Rinoa whispered.

"No." he said quickly, not because he was really sure of that answer, but because he couldn't take the look on her face anymore. It crushed his heart in its merciless fingers and fed him the pulverized remnants, until Squall thought he might vomit. "He's fine." _It's Seifer. He's always fine, even when you don't want him to be. _He didn't speak those words aloud because they were meant for him and not her, a reassurance he was shocked to need. How many times had he dreamed of this scenario? The traitor limp and ashen-faced just as he was now, with blood curling in sinuous serpent's tails from his mouth and nostrils, Lionheart pointing its shiny, deadly finger out the back of his spine.

Squall looked down at the man with the face that was sometimes much too similar to his own features, reaching for the smoldering ember of his hatred. He nudged the scatters of its coals in the cold fire pit of his gut, but they were only burned out shells now, cold like the blade of ice wedging itself between the bones of his spinal column.

He looked young and vulnerable, like the boy Squall could just barely remember wrestling in shallow seawater by the lighthouse with a smiling Matron looking on. The inflamed magenta lights of Galbadia's missile strike did not stroke its brutal fingers across the face of a killer or a traitor, just a pale young man with dark shadows beneath his eyes.

"He'll be ok." Squall said again, directing his best 'I'm-your-Commander-so-have-faith-in-me' look toward her. He never had been very good at it, and he didn't think it worked now considering the unrelenting tenseness of her face. "Help me get him over to the water cycle." He indicated the vehicle he'd ridden across the lashing waves with his chins, shifting Seifer in his arms.

It took them several minutes to awkwardly hoist Seifer across the gas tank, where Squall clumsily secured him with one hand while he climbed aboard, shifting his weight delicately so he didn't send the unconscious ex-knight right back into the ocean. The craft rocked dangerously and Seifer's lifeless bulk slipped to one side; Squall grabbed a handful of his shirt and just barely managed to hold him on, the socket of his left shoulder screaming profanities at him.

He finally settled into place, one arm pinning Seifer to slick metal while the other rested on the right handlebar. He looked at Rinoa expectantly, and found her staring sadly at his sheathed gun blade.

His heart knew before her words lightly caressed his ears, quietly firm beneath the distant cacophony of Galbadia's attack. It died a slow and painful death, liquefying inside his ribcage until the viscous puddle of it leaked out through his ribs.

"Squall, you have to now."

"No!" he snapped. "There's no reason to. You're back, Rinoa."

"But what if it's not permanent? I can still feel her inside me. She could get free again."

"But you've got a chance now." he argued stubbornly. "We know you can take control again--there has to be some way to separate the two of you permanently."

"But we don't know how long that will take to figure out. More people might die."

_I don't care. I don't care, as long as you stay alive. _he thought, feeling the sludge of his heart drooling into the gaping maw of his stomach.

"I'll do it if you can't. I know I'm asking a lot of you, Squall."

He snatched Lionheart angrily from her grazing fingers. "No. We have a chance, Rinoa. I'll protect you."

"I know." she said, and smiled her beautiful sunshine smile at him, the one that had first won him over, warming his granite heart into something much more pliable. Too bad it was so easily punctured now; granite was impervious to the knife blades of anguish that stabbed him everywhere. Granite didn't care if this black-haired beauty with her soft eyes and her even softer hands lived or died. "But you shouldn't anymore. I'm dangerous, Squall."

"No." he repeated. It was the only thing left he could say, the only word he could squeeze from his contracting throat.

The sky came alive with the spells that dripped from her fingertips. Squall drooped instantly under the influence of Sleep, and Rinoa grabbed Seifer's ankle before he could slide off as the other man's grip on him loosened abruptly.

She used several strips of material torn from her own outfit to bind them both tightly to the machine, looping it in complicated knots around any available protrusions until she was satisfied they wouldn't slip.

Then she gently kissed the side of Squall's sleeping face, Float mushrooming out from her conciousness and embracing the water cycle in its flickering veil shimmer of an embrace.

She watched only until the water cycle safely reached the shore, and then looked numbly down into the black water of her gravesite.

* * *

Her cheery yellow pajamas were the only splash of color through the layers of dust and ashes coating everything.

Something kicked him hard in the gut. He didn't know what, because he could have sworn he was all alone, and yet the sensation was there, the breath-robbing impact of a boot to the stomach, folding him onto his knees.

He could see the back of her head too--he hadn't noticed it before because those shiny brown strands--like everything else--lay still and gray beneath the graveyard silence of settling dust and smoke. Even the blood there--this place's one other chance at variety in its death field of black and white--had dried to dull auburn.

Irvine's couldn't feel his fingers. Exeter, wrapped in his grip of white-knuckled steel, suddenly didn't exist anymore--he could see it through the film of tears burning over his eyeballs, but the cool comfort of its presence no longer registered.

"Selphie."

Someone had snuck up behind him while he grieved--they must have, because the garbled, strangled syllables of her name couldn't possibly have emerged from his own lips.

He opened his mouth and tried again. "Selphie."

Her name was just a hiccup this time, just a ragged sob that he could barely understand.

His beautiful, funny, quirky Selphie, her limbs pinned like the tacked wings of a dead butterfly, her face smashed into the stringy pulp of shredded meat.

_At least you can't see her face. _he thought, tightening his grip on his rifle.

The thought didn't help. There was nothing he could think of right now, nothing he could look at that could sew back together the ragged lips of the hole that split wide open inside him. The sucking wound pulled everything into it, all his internal organs, all the memories of her smiling, laughing face, a black hole in the outermost reaches of space that devoured everything.

From the whirling tornado wind of the recollections being pulled inexorably into the center of that gravity well, Irvine plucked one away at random.

It was a snapshot memory of her preparing for one of her infamous parties, perky hair mussed, cheeks flushed, eyes twin jet streams of eager green fire.

He crumpled over the scalpel that inserted itself through the layers of his mucles and into the base of his spine--thin like a single strand of wire, but exquisitely painful--and began to sob.

He spilled everything from the bleak gravity well inside him into the palms of the hands he slapped up over his face. The puddle of angst collecting in the lifeline of his left palm was a million reflections of her pretty, energetic face relaxed into peaceful sleep. The teardrops united together in one sparkling pond in his right hand were the mirror that showed him the collage of random images that had been their life together.

"_Selphie_!" Irvine screamed, the cry ripping itself from his throat in one long animal ululation as he tore his face from his hands, leaning his head back to shriek up into the exposed sky. The coils of smoke forming cotton buds of black in the night sky burned his streaming eyes; he choked on their pungent fumes, inhaling deeply as they draped their strangling hands over his throat. He couldn't stop breathing, even though part of him wanted to, and they forced their bitter fingers down his throat, caressing along the sides of his windpipe like unwanted lovers.

He hunched over again, breaking their power, Exeter rolling from his hand.

He stared dumbly down at his fingers, wondering when they'd opened, wondering when his rifle had decided to abandon him as well, just like everything else that meant anything to him.

Irvine whispered her name this time, because the aching column of his throat couldn't manage anything else. "Selphie."

It took him an eternity, but finally he crawled forward toward her, pulling himself along military style on his belly, using his forearms to propel himself--not out of any necessity, but simply because he couldn't seem to work his legs anymore. They dragged as useless deadweight behind him, trailing him like the leaden mass that was the corpse of his heart.

He pushed a couple of slats of wood from her back that he thought had once been the shelves of a bookcase. She'd never kept much there, never having been much of a reader--just a few women's magazines and a few non-fiction books that Quistis had probably forced on her--but she'd built them herself and had been immensely proud of her accomplishment, lopsided though it may have been.

Her hand twitched.

Lying beside his left knee, thickly coated in dirt, he felt it spasm briefly, and the furnace of his central nervous system kicked back into sudden, painful life.

Hurting all over with the force of his suppressed hope, Irvine began to dig faster, unearthing different sections of her body at random; her slender torso, her pajama top shredded and the delicate skin of her back torn here and there, one pale, limp arm, a dainty foot.

It took him forever to finally free her, and, as gently as he could, grimacing because she might have neck or back injuries that movement would only aggravate, Irvine turned her tenderly over in his arms, his hands framing her pallid face. "Selphie. Selphie, honey, can you hear me?"

She was breathing. _She was breathing. _It was the only thing that had ever mattered to him--his own heart beat with the shallow rise and fall of her chest, the air trickling through at last into his constricted lungs entering him just as hesitantly as oxygen dribbled into her slightly parted lips.

He rocked her against him, kissing her dusty hair. "Selphie, honey, come on, honey, open your eyes, say somethin.' _Please_." He'd never begged before--in his own way Irvine was just as proud a man as Seifer, but he did so now, pleading with her, with any deity he could think of, beseeching all his old instructors to just let her live, even the ones who hadn't liked him. "Selphie. Selphie, Selphie, please! Please, please, please, darlin.' Open your eyes for me, ok? Selph, please, sweetheart--" His voice began to crack and he stopped, petting her hair again, smoothing it back from her closed eyes. He leaned down and pressed his mouth hard against hers, like he was the prince in some fairytale and she the sleeping princess.

But the cigarette-glow of random fires here and there and the paint spill splotch of blood across her face was no fairytale setting.

Irvine squeezed his eyes shut, a few tears trickling from underneath his eyelashes. "Selphie." he whispered, his voice cracking again, so sharply this time he didn't even recognize it. "Selphie honey, jest please do this for me. Please, honey. I'll take you to the nicest restaurant anyone's ever seen. We haven't done that in a while, right? You wanted to go to a nice restaurant. I'll take you there, honey, I promise. I jest need you to look at me, ok? That's all you have to do." He slipped one of his palms over the curve of her gashed cheek, stroking the bruised shadows beneath her eyes. "Selph?"

His hope began to die back down into the embers of an abruptly banked fire.

He buried his face in her hair, hugging her tightly to him, his shoulders jerking in another bout of helpless sobs.

She groaned and moved slightly against him. "Ouch, Irvy. It hurts."

He loosened his grasp immediately and pulled back to look at her. "Selphie! I'm sorry, honey. Am I hurting you? Where does it hurt? Thank you Hyne. Thank you _Hyne_." he blurted out in an uncharacteristic jumble of words, his usual suave speech deteriorating into clumsy babble. He kissed her euphorically again.

It was this scene that Zell--holding a soot-streaked Bria by the hand--stumbled across, and even on this night of such horrible death and destruction, hope swelled in his chest like an expanding balloon.

He was tearing up too as he knelt beside Irvine, pulling Bria with them and enfolding the entire little circle into a crushing group hug, but they were not the droplets of grief that Irvine had shed just a few minutes ago. They were relief, and they were joy, and even in surroundings like the ones smoking around them, he could recapture memories of happiness and wrap himself in them until they felt real again.

* * *

He hurt everywhere, and for several disoriented moments Seifer wondered if he'd done something to piss Quistis off and didn't remember being beaten up by her.

_Probably gave me a concussion. _he thought, scowling without opening his eyes. She was supposed to be the calm one, dammit, the cool little Ice Queen that could diffuse any situation before tempers roared out of control. Instead she was the match as often as he, the strike that fueled the fire, the--

He wrenched his eyes open as his memories returned to him in one crushing wrecking ball of memory, and wished he hadn't. The pinpoints of stars far above him spun drunkenly, inebriated ballerinas going about their performance in a confusing swirl of ungainly dance moves, a piss poor attempt at synchronization. The frozen photograph of her face as his fist collided with it sketched itself into the stars, and Seifer blinked rapidly, trying to clear his gaze.

He sat up, and regretted that too.

The silky whisper of sand beneath his palms scratched its way into his ears. He dumped the night-stained grains through his fingers, trying to remember how he'd made it to the beach, squinting a long way down the shore toward where Xu was attempting to organize panicked SeeD cadets.

When had he made it back to the beach? He'd honestly thought he was going to die--he hadn't particularly wanted to, but if he'd managed to cause even some small amount of damage to one of that bitch's weapons, it would have been worth it. He could have had his knight's death of fire and glory, instead of sitting here covered in saltwater and sand, thinking about how Raijin's throat had looked as metal shards peeled it open like the cocoon of a metamorphasizing caterpillar.

His water cycle rested nearby on the sand--no, not his water cycle. He was pretty sure that was a different number stamped across the gas tank, and his had carried a wide red stripe painted down both sides of it, not the yellow jacket gold that adorned this one.

A man whose hunched posture suddenly reminded Seifer of himself at his lowest points kneeled in the shallow water, head bowed, his dark hair billowing out around him.

The forehead was scarred just like his, Seifer knew without seeing the man's face, the eyes probably similarly haunted. He stood carefully, moving slowly until he was sure he wouldn't fall over, and then he stiffly approached Squall, his heart knocking around somewhere in the sand between his boots, like a dribbled soccer ball.

He squatted next to him, lacing his hands between his thighs, looking out over the water.

He could see Ultimicea's ship in the distance, still whole and untouched, but somehow he knew the sorceress was no longer commanding it. He could see, out of the corner of one eye, the shine of Lionheart lying naked and lethal across Squall's knees, small ocean waves slopping lazily over it each time the sea crawled its way onto shore.

"I'm sorry." Seifer said, wrongly thinking he could guess what had happened. He didn't add any mocking nicknames or insults this time--Leonheart was hurting enough as it was, and at any rate, the man was probably too far gone to even pay attention.

His next action surprised even him. His hand grew a mind of its own and set itself gently on one of Squall's stooped shoulders, molding to the convex shape of his slouched posture, a comradely touch, the comforting squeeze of a friend who expects nothing in return.

They remained like that for a long time, listening to the cacophonous booms of war and the screams of those caught in the middle, eyes fixed somewhere over the far horizon where the sun was making its first attempts at dawn.

"I didn't kill her." Squall said thickly. "She woke up, Seifer--she was Rinoa again, and I couldn't do it. So she did."

Seifer released his aching legs from their squat, lowering his ass down onto the sand.

"I could have saved her. I told her I'd protect her, but I guess she didn't believe me."

Seifer digested that for a while before replying. "Maybe she was just tired of other people making sacrifices."

It was the wrong thing to say. Startling Seifer, Squall suddenly flung his gun blade as hard as he could across the flat obsidian water, skipping it like a deadly stone before it finally settled and began to sink. Seifer watched the ocean bubble slightly around it, closing its frigid embrace around the weapon that was as much a piece of Garden's commander as Hyperion was an extension of his own limb.

But maybe with Rinoa gone, Squall just didn't really care anymore. Seifer knew he'd have a hard time giving a shit about a piece of metal if that were Quistis out there somewhere beneath the murky surface, her limbs spread in a deadman's float as she descended to her final resting place.

The furious move was the last one Squall had left in him; his limbs drooped slackly now, the moon still shining a watery silver path across the sea accenting the pastiness of his face, his scar standing out in bright contrast.

Seifer sat with a man he wasn't quite sure was his enemy anymore until the sun chased the moon back into her bedroom of crimson and mauve, the sky brightening above them into shades of red and purple, the shades arranging themselves artistically across the gleaming sliver of metal that was all that was left of the sinking Garden.

* * *

Squall.

_Burning sunlight, and even more acidic memories._

Squall.

_Salt drying out the tongue and grinding its abrasive hands against a million lacerations flecked across the body. _

Squall.

Shut up bitch. Can't you think of something else?

_Gull screams in her ears, bright blue sky spiraling into the shrinking irises of her eyes, pupils blown wide against the sudden infiltration of daylight. _What did you do to him?

Nothing, stupid. You stopped me, remember?

_His skin under her fingertips, clean-shaven but rough with just the faintest hint of stubble. His beautiful lion-fierce eyes open wide in his scarred face, his lips against hers and the clean woodland scent of his cologne beneath the stink of sea life and loss._

I saved him. But why are you still here? I killed us.

I saved us. _The snarl of the sorceress, purring like a chainsaw inside her head. _Barely. We washed up on the beach. Get up, or we'll both die.

So I'm…I'm still in control.

Get _up_.

_Sand beneath the cheek, sun-warmed and welcoming as a familiar pillow after a long journey. Bliss coating the veins in the honey sweetness of triumph. _I saved him. I'm going to save them all, you know.

_Get up_!


	23. Chapter 22

**Chapter Twenty Two**

Motel 382

Deling City

Quistis blinked up into curlicues of fading gray paint intermingled with the decaying remnants of wallpaper long past its prime and wondered for the millionth time that night what Seifer was doing.

Was he even doing anything, or just taking an eternal nap in the ocean off the coast of Centra, ravenous fish plucking his gorgeous eyeballs from his head as miniature sea life nested in the golden anemone of his hair?

She squeezed her eyes shut on that image, rolling herself tighter into the protective ball she'd wound her lean body into. Noisy raindrops pummeled the rusting frame of her room's window, aggressive fists angry over the denial of their entrance. They sounded like missile blasts to her, like the detonations of a million bombs murdering her home and her comrades, echoing on endlessly in her ears.

'Infinity' was an interesting word, Quistis thought. It was forever, neverending, and therefore nothing could last longer than it. Yet somehow, impossibly, 'infinity' was too small a word for how long she would hear the echoes of shattering torpedos and the screams of young soldiers who were really nothing more than frightened children at that moment. 'Infinity' was so insignificant, so…simplistic a way to describe the way the ever-present memories of shrieks and explosions sometimes swelled out around her, growing so bloated they blocked out all conversation around her, all other thoughts swirling through her head at the moment.

The memories were just whispers now, hiding childishly in the shadows and promising they'd be back for her when she was least ready for them; Quistis pulled one questionable-looking pillow over her exposed ear, but material does not block soundtracks of the mind.

She would just have to live with it, as she'd been doing for almost a week now.

She sighed and swung her legs over the side of the bed, wondering why she even bothered. The mattress' comfort and cleanliness was even more questionable than the pillow's, and considering all the distractions marathon sprinting through her brain, slumber hardly seemed very important.

Squall was missing, probably dead. Seifer was also missing, possibly afflicted with a similar fate to his twin-scarred counterpart. Selphie, Irvine, Zell and Bria were all still alive, though it would be awhile before Selphie threw another of her famous get-together's.

Seifer might be dead.

The knowledge was still a sucker punch to the gut, a sword through the intestines where the healing wound Matron had left behind still festered. His unknown fate ripped it wide again and shoved tentacles of searing poison between the lesion's jagged, ugly lips. Quistis felt like only half a person these days, the same skeleton frame Seifer had been right after the end of the Sorceress War.

How many times had she grieved for him? How many times had she lost hope, just to rediscover his stupid, smirking face, arrogant and sure of itself as always, trying to kiss her while she still registered the fact that he was even alive?

She couldn't keep yo-yoing back and forth like this. Her emotions were the strings of a long-unused guitar, fragile, easily broken, a few missing in some places--and Seifer was the damn pick strumming frail strands with unnecessary roughness.

Quistis buried her face in her hands and laid back down on her bed, rolling back into her ball. It was the only thing holding her together anymore, really. As if tucking knees to chin and balling a fist beneath one cheek could hold together the just-barely-clinging-on jigsaw pieces of a human being.

It had worked so far, at least.

The window suddenly rattled in its frame, a more deliberate sound than random weather patterns taking out heaven's anger.

She rolled to her feet, whip in hand as she tucked herself behind the ratty curtains. The establishment was in one of the seedier sections of Deling City to say the least, and all things considered, she was faring pretty well with only one attempted burglary.

The window pane slid up with a remonstrating screech, and she struck before the dark figure was even fully into the room. Her elbow snapped out and buried itself in his windpipe--or would have, except the man was surprisingly quick, and dodged the strike with a muttered curse. She allowed her warrior's body to carry her naturally around, blending seamlessly into the dance that was combat, following her failed hit with a knee to the solar plexus that found its mark.

Her attacker stumbled into the curtains, voluminous material ballooning around him as he sucked air greedily, a half-drowned swimmer just released from the lethal grasp of a riptide.

"Stop! Shit, just stop, dammit!" the man growled between clenched teeth, and she did as he demanded--not because the hoarse rasp was intimidating, but because she recognized the tone and the harsh words.

Quistis whip bounced against the floor and rolled underneath the bed as she dropped to her knees in front of him. "Seifer!"

He was real and alive and warm and solid beneath her hands--she flung herself on him more enthusiastically than either one would have expected, knocking them both back onto the thinly carpeted floor, his head banging against the small nightstand next to her bed. "Ow, fuck!"

"Sorry."

He smirked at her--she could sense it even in the dark, and traced her fingers along the familiar stretch of his lips, smiling down into the black shadow of his face, her relief sprouting sparrow's wings out from either side of her heart and knocking the entire thing erratically against her sternum.

Seifer reached up to cradle her face in his large hands and kissed her roughly. He stroked the back of her head as he held her, slipping his tongue through the rosebud opening of her mouth and tasting her, reassuring them both.

The embrace exploded into the desperate sort of passion that was the culmination of a week's worth of stress and fear, and before either had even realized it, they were both shirtless, Seifer kissing a burning trail down Quistis' neck and over the tops of her breasts, his hands grinding her hips into his.

She ran her fingertips lightly down his chest, over his nipples and down the hard muscles of his abdomen, hooking them gently in the waistband of his jeans and leaving them there as he sat up, bringing Quistis with him until she straddled him, his mouth sucking a dizzying path across her throat and up to one ear. He bit it lightly, flicking the lobe with his tongue, his hands skimming up her bare stomach to cup her breasts. He slid his fingers beneath the cups of her bra and just barely skimmed across her nipples, kissing his way back to her lips.

She fisted a handful of his hair, arching her body into him, her mouth pursuing his, trapping it--and then with a sudden gasp Seifer broke away, leaning back as he caught his breath, shoulders heaving, cheeks flushed and eyes slightly dilated. "Sorry. You said you didn't want to--" He looked down to where she still straddled him, her pelvis pushed into his, and arched an eyebrow. "You want to get off that? It's not making things any easier."

Quistis turned bright red and obediently crawled off him as Seifer laughed breathlessly. He caught her by the elbow as she edged away and pulled her back, pecking her lips softly this time as he cupped one cheek in his hand. "Miss me, Instructor?"

She frowned at him. "You have to stop doing this, Seifer."

"What? Making you hot for my incredible body?"

"Convinving me that you're probably dead about every other day."

His arrogant face turned gentle suddenly; it was just a subtle shift of the features, a few simple tweaks of his fierce, prideful countenance that probably would have gone unnoticed by anyone else, but Quistis had studied him long enough to pick up on his nuances, even some of the ones he probably thought no one had figured out. He ran one of his thumbs lightly over her lips and down her chin, his eyes two miniature lightning strikes to her heart, stopping the organ dead and then painfully re-starting it once more like a protesting engine. "You tried to kill me three times, I'm legally dead, and I even survived Chicken Wuss' singing; face it, Quistis, I'm fuckin' invincible."

She shook her head. "I wonder, sometimes, Seifer."

"So did you miss me?" he persisted, leaning back on his elbows and regarding her with his tiger's eyes of green fire, the feral gaze two splashes of vibrant color in the dark.

"In the same way that someone misses e. coli." Quistis replied smartly, folding her arms over her chest.

He smiled at her, and it was the smile she liked best, the one that was just Seifer the man and not Seifer the bully or the ex-knight, just an adult version of the boy's toothy grin. It reminded her of sitting under starry skies listening to Selphie shriek as the ocean waves attacked her feet, the boys playing soldiers nearby.

It was a game they played too well nowadays.

She sighed as he inspected her through narrow eyes--she hated this look of his, the drill bit pulse of his eyes as they chewed through every one of her defenses and her secrets, seeing through to the insecure, meek core that was really the infamous, fearless Ice Queen. "Fine, Seifer. Yes, I missed you."

"Say you like me." he demanded, smirking this time.

"That's asking too much." she shot back, and quickly stood, moving onto the bed once more.

He climbed to his feet to follow her, leaning in and suddenly grazing her chin with the lightest touch of his lips, a featherweight kiss she barely felt. It was the same place he'd punched a week ago, and he left his mouth pressed to it for a long time, as though the pressure might siphon out all the bad memories and old injuries trapped beneath her skin.

He didn't apologize aloud when he finally pulled back, but his eyes spoke the words anyway.

Quistis sighed again. "I know why you did it, Seifer. I forgive you." She did; it was hard not to, with the frozen still frame of him hunched and defeated over Raijin's body etched permanently into her mind. Looking at him now awakened only a mixed jumble of relief and compassion, the latter an emotion she was still adjusting to. Before, he'd inspired many feelings in her--frustration, anger, outright hatred--but never the earthworm squirm of sympathy, nibbling away at the barricades around her heart in a way Squall's lone wolf bitterness never really had. Despite the time that had passed, Quistis was still getting used to that.

"How did you find me?" she asked as he flopped across her bed, stealing both pillows and most of her covers.

"Squall." Seifer replied casually, unaware of the way that name pulled her stiffly upright, like a marionette yanked suddenly into position by its master. "He talked to Xu, and she told him where you were staying."

"Squall's alive?" Quistis repeated numbly.

He cracked an eye at her. "Yeah, Pubes is fine."

The nickname brought her back down to earth with her Instructor's scowl in place. "Stop calling him that."

"What do you want me to call him?" Seifer retorted.

"Maybe his _name_--he does have one, you know." she said icily.

"What are you pissy about all of a sudden? I'm back--any sexual frustrations that have been building over the last few days can be taken out on my body. And also, I'm not Zell. That right there is something to be grateful for."

Quistis pinched the bridge of her nose. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you like that. It's been a stressful week. I thought you both were dead. Where is he?"

"Camping in one of the forests a few miles outside the city limits. We've been staying there since Galbadia sank Garden."

"Camping?" she said dumbly, staring at him. "With Squall?"

"Yeah, we're a couple of regular fucking boy scouts. You know, I've been thinking about that." he said, rapidly switching subjects.

"About what?" she asked, feeling slightly dizzy.

"Garden. Why didn't the stupid thing just fucking fly away?"

He sounded so nonchalant, so non-caring, so, pre-war; the old Seifer who concerned himself over little except bullying younger students and chasing women. Anger flash burned a path through her veins, sprinkling the ashes of her composure in its wake. "How can you be so flippant about this, Seifer? Innocent people died. One of your friends died."

He looked away, his gaze spitting nails as he focused on the wall above her head with its peeling wallpaper and unidentified stains. She saw the tendons in his throat bulge, relax, then tighten again.

Anger's roaring inferno settled into the cozy fireplace warmth of a controlled blaze, and, slowly, Quistis lowered herself down next to him. "Seifer."

He yanked his hand away from the fingers she stretched tentatively toward it. It was easy to forget just how much personal tragedy he'd endured recently when he hid behind his sneers and his smart-ass comments--he'd always been good at covering up disappointment and hurt, not in the marble-blank robot-faced way that Squall had always managed, but with the skilled actor's masquerade of a talented thespian that he slapped in place over all the ugliness that lay beneath.

"He was useless anyway, even if he'd lived; he couldn't walk anymore."

He didn't really believe that--he said it because harshness shellaced the feeble cracks in the armor of his voice and glossed over the tremble in his vocal cords. Truthfully, if it could have saved his friend, he'd have slung the heavy son of a bitch over his shoulders and swam all the way to the beach if need be. Loyalty was not given easily from him, but once earned it didn't simply go away. Raijin had earned it, and Seifer had failed him.

He failed a lot of things in life; he supposed he should be used to it by now, yet somehow it still hurt.

She said something useless and stupid, as people often did in their graceless attempts at comfort. "I know it hurts, Seifer. I'm sorry."

_No, no you don't. You don't fucking know, because you've never failed anything or anyone in your life before. _he thought, and laid down on his stomach, his wide open eyes dissecting the pattern on her shabby quilt. Maybe somewhere in the abstract, sloppy stitching of this shitty piece of material, he would discover the meaning of life when it eluded him in the millions of ceiling cracks he'd spent the last couple of years of sleepless nights perusing.

Quistis laid down beside him after several long minutes of silence, counted out in noisy ticks on the wristwatch decorating one of her slender arms.

He thought about how nice it was to feel her warmth cushioned up against him again, her soft curves clicking like neatly-fitting puzzle pieces into the shape of his own hard body.

Seifer smelled peaches, and the faint wisp of raspberry again, and shut his eyes.

_I love you. _he thought toward the woman whose small body felt so much stronger and more able against his, and yet at the same time brittle like elderly bones, a priceless glass figurine. She was so many contradictions, so many confusing paradoxes. She was cold, hard, unbreakable steel--thin, spring-warmed ice.

He turned onto his side to stare at the back of her head. "Rinoa's dead."

She said nothing for a long, long time, and he began to think that perhaps the subtle in and out movement of her shoulder blades was the soft breath of slumber. "So he finally did it."

She sounded composed, but he knew what the carefully restrained tone of her voice meant; it was her hand holding the reins of emotional control in a death grip, her throat iced over into the passionless inflection of an automaton.

It was how she fought off the assault of her tears.

Seifer lightly touched the strands of her hair that lay between them. "No; she did actually."

"To save him. I guess…she was stronger than we all thought, if she held Ultimicea off long enough to…sacrifice herself."

Would Quistis do that for him? He hoped not--his life wasn't worth anywhere close to what hers amounted to, and yet the naturally selfish part of himself liked to think that she cared about him enough to give up her own life just to save him. No one had ever liked him that much, except maybe Matron, and in the end her 'protection' had almost destroyed him.

Rinoa wouldn't have given a second thought to trading her life for Squall's, Seifer knew. Leonheart _was _her life, the solar center of her universe. Their relationship had been stupid, sappy fairytale mush, but deep down a part of Seifer had envied it; in a world where people never really held onto anything for long, they'd had each other, forever. Or they were supposed to.

Which was why he'd never believed in fairytales. A few poetic words strung together into some shitty little story with its fairies and princesses and happy endings wasn't reality--reality was death and war and fallen heroes. Reality was the skeleton man known as Seifer Almasy, a corpse of a person whose physical body kept functioning for some unknown reason.

Reality was Quistis Trepe, lying half-drowned beneath the bruised shadows of a nighttime beach and thinking about her mother's head exploding.

Reality was Squall Leonheart, too broken for natural grief, throwing the blade that had been his constant companion for nearly eight years into the bloody waters that held her gape-mouthed cadaver.

Squall's anguish was Seifer's as well as he lay staring at Quistis' supple back. The folds of the room's darkness cradled her between their black palms, drawing shadow grooves into the natural creases of her shirt. The gentle ascent and descent of her ribcage expanding with breath was constant--but nothing was forever constant, except death.

He'd probably lose her the same way Squall had lost Rinoa one day, and then where would he be? Sitting beside a dead-faced Squall in a bar somewhere, too useless and numb to even drown his sorrows in alcohol? Fighting with wild cat ferocity on a battlefield, praying every second that the next gunshot would be for him, the next blade thrust a fatal riposte through his heart?

Quistis flipped over to lie on her back. Her face was calm, but he saw through the chinks in the chain mail of her careful barriers. "I never thought I'd see him without her again. Part of me hoped for that, at first, even after I convinced myself that I'd confused sisterly affection for puppy love."

Jealousy stabbed Seifer through the heart, pinning it to the icy corkboard of his ribcage. It was a stupid sensation considering the circumstances, but it was instinctive, and crushing--maybe part of her did love him, but it would never be as much as she loved Leonheart. He tried to conjure up his usual irritation for the man, but there just wasn't much left anymore; even Seifer found it hard to think about petty annoyances when Squall was sitting before a rained-out campfire trying to remember how to piece back together the sections of his destroyed heart while Seifer lay next to the woman he loved.

"But I saw after a while how good she was for him," Quistis went on, speaking slowly, pushing the words out with difficulty. "He came alive when he was with Rinoa, and I never did that for him. He was always so closed-off, and I wanted to fix that, but somehow she was the only one who figured out how to do that. I'm not sure what he's going to do without her."

_Neither is he. _Seifer thought, remembering the defeated slump of Squall's shoulders as they sat together in the curling foam of shallow ocean waves.

"Nothing lasts forever, does it, Seifer. Even the things that are supposed to." It wasn't a question, so he didn't bother answering.

She turned her head to look at him. "You must regret ever coming back to Garden."

"Executed, then thrown into the middle of a war fighting with people I don't even fucking like; I even had to save Chicken Wuss' life. It's pretty much sucked." _But I don't regret any of it. _He didn't add that aloud, because the maudlin direction of his thoughts disgusted him, and bitterness over having her feelings for Squall rubbed in his face still rankled slightly. Let her think whatever she wanted.

"Some things were worth it, though, weren't they?" she asked, looked shyly up at the ceiling.

"No, not really." he said harshly. "Panting over Puberty Boy's leftovers isn't exactly something I'm fucking proud of."

Quistis propped herself on an elbow, looking at him oddly. "What are you talking about?"

"Look, I get it." he snapped. "You'll always love the little wuss bag. I mean, fuck--look at the guy's furry little jacket. I can't compete with that." Seifer went on sarcastically. "I'm sure all that fashion sense and brooding shit makes up for being small in the pants."

Quistis' lips flickered ever-so-slightly. "How would you know details about what's in Squall's pants?"

"I pantsed him in front of our weapons class when we were thirteen. Remember? You were there."

She didn't remember, really--just a few flickering splinters of embedded memory; screaming girls, bright red cheeks, Seifer's jeering laughter…

"Why are you jealous of him?"

:"Being small in the pants is the new 'in' thing." Seifer snarked, drawing mocking little quotes in the air with his fingers.

"And you've always been one to follow the trends." Quistis gently teased him. "I don't have feelings for Squall, Seifer. Not anymore." She hesitated, her mouth splitting around unspoken words, then sealing up again.

He crossed his arms and sulked. It was childish, but he was tired of being Quistis' second choice. Maybe she'd mostly forgotten Squall, but if he weren't so bent out of shape over Rinoa and were to offer himself to Quistis, right now, she'd accept him with open arms. Never mind the annoying little puppy dog traitor clinging to her heels--Squall Leonheart was her fucking _destiny _or something idiotic like that.

"Seifer."

"What?"

She kissed the side of his face, and slid one of her hands over his chest. He ignored her until the hand slipped lower and grabbed the hem of his shirt, drawing it up over the scar-dotted flesh of his stomach. "What are you doing?"

She blushed and looked down at her hands, like they'd suddenly grown minds of their own and now she wasn't sure what to do. "I'm ready."

It took a moment for the meaning of her words to register in his baffled mind, and then he realized he'd just swallowed a burning rock, the hot lump of it sitting in the middle of his throat, just resting smugly there daring him to try and talk around it.

"You mean…" he trailed off, swallowing hard. "Are you sure? It's not like you haven't already blue-balled me a few times. Hyne gave men two hands for a reason--one to jack off with, the other to hold a beer."

"Don't joke." she demanded, peeling his shirt carefully off, moving deliberately and not looking at him.

"Why? The first time is supposed to be all weepy and romantic and shit, right?" _You're babbling, you fucking moron. Just shut up. _"Talking ruins the magic?"

"There's nothing magical about bodily fluids and animal grunting." Quistis replied coolly. "And not all talking ruins it, just yours."

He laid there for a moment beneath her, and then suddenly burst out laughing. Quistis Trepe--logical down to the very last detail, even over sex.

He hugged her around the waist and kissed her neck, then flipped her off him with a deft thrust of his hips, switching positions with her until she lay pinned gently beneath him.

She looked fucking beautiful, and his heart was trying to slam itself out the side of his neck.

Seifer leaned down and softly kissed her, with just the lightest pressure at first, and then more firmly as the feel of her body beneath his aroused him, parting her lips with his tongue, sliding one hand off her wrist to run it gently over her breasts, just barely grazing. He heard her breath catch and pulled away, staring down into her fluttering eyes. "You sure?"

"You already asked me that." she said without opening her eyes.

He pulled her upright, pressing their torsos together as he pulled her shirt over her head, mussing her blonde hair--and suddenly he felt nervous again, like a sweaty virgin getting lucky with the bombshell older woman who had far more experience beneath her belt. He kissed her hard to cover his shaking hands, undoing her bra and kissing down the arch of her neck to her breasts. She kissed his neck, once, twice, then hesitantly grazed it with her teeth, and his light panting turned into the winded gasps of a tiring runner.

He pushed her back down onto the bed, straddling her hips, his lips burning a fiery trail down her stomach to the waistband of her jeans. Seifer undid them quickly, clumsily, his fingers twitching in nervous, fidgety little jerks of motion that she couldn't help but notice.

Quistis smiled up at him, and he scowled down at her without any real malice. "Are you laughing at me?"

"This just isn't the suave, debonair Seifer Almasy I expected."

He kept the scowl for another few seconds, and then her brilliant smile tilted his lips back up, and he leaned down to kiss her as he slid her pants off, taking his off and then slowly drawing her panties down the moonlight silk of her legs.

"Go slow." he heard her whisper as he positioned himself over her, leaning his weight on his hands.

The rain drowned the sounds of their union, tapping out a cadenced song on the window pane as they tangled together in a knot of half-made sheets and twisted blankets.

He threw a log onto the dying fire and watched sparks trail their burning phoenix tail's of light up into the sky.

The sky above the sputtering death of his campfire was empty, just like her eyes were now. The knight's shield cloud bank of a rainstorm blotted out all light from the stars, leaving just the vanishing tangerine glow of his blaze to reflect the glow of his eyes.

They were the only spots of color in his entire face, feverish blue against the ashen backdrop of his cheekbones.

Squall stared at the last few sparking coals for a long time before finally lying down on his back, the spongy wet grass beneath him a soggy caress along his aching muscles, thinking about how for the first time in the week since Rinoa's death, he could feel again. Not very much, but there was emotion leaking in around the gaping crater where the center of his chest had once been, and it was loneliness of all things that ate away at him, because Seifer had been gone for three hours now.

Squall Leonheart missed Seifer Almasy. Funny how things worked out. He used to spend long afternoons of gritted teeth and clenched fists wishing the stupid, jeering man would just drop through a sudden hole in the floor and fall forever, until Squall could no longer feel the mocking whisper stroke of his hissed insults from the back of the classroom, and now…

Now he just felt lost, and alone, and even if Seifer hadn't been the most friendly of company, he'd at least been _there_.

It was just him and the fire now, and even that was leaving him, just like everything else did.

Squall closed his eyes.

He used to wish people would just leave him alone--Seifer with his immature cruelty and petty abuse of powers granted to him by the disciplinarian committee, Quistis with her too-probing questions and her open blue eyes, coaxing him to spill his guts when he only wanted a little peace and quiet. People had always been a nuisance to Squall--as a whole they were stupid, rude, and annoying, Rinoa included when he first met her. She was helpless even when she tried not to be, superficial and a little childish--all the things he was not.

He still didn't know what had first begun to draw him to her. He only knew that when the monsters summoned by Ultimicea began their assault against the raven-haired beauty while he stood below in the crushing mob of eager parade viewers, something inside him exploded with a supernova brilliance. The wide stretched 'o' of her pink mouth tore at a heart he'd begun to believe had turned to stone, the pale hands thrown out in futile defense scratching away at a wall he hadn't even realized he'd built.

It was the beginning of everything, including the end. And now when he wasn't even sure how to survive without her, she left him.

He'd never considered life to be fair. But this…this was too much.

The wet night air closed its too-fervent lover's embrace around him as the last of the fire flickered out, leaving a pocket of cold surrounding Squall that penetrated through to his bones. He let it seep into him, because it just didn't matter anymore.

Rinoa was much colder than he, anyway, in her tomb of ocean water and broken promises. How could he complain about something so insignificant as unpleasant weather changes?

The shuffling whisper of wet leaves stirred under stealthy feet snatched him back from the brink of sleep, but he didn't open his eyes. Instead, he snapped the restraints on all his soldier's instincts, gut-kicked the rigid self-control that had been schooled into him since childhood, and ignored possible approaching danger.

It didn't matter anymore.

Her voice was hesitant, and clogged with tears.

"Squall, please…you have to…I can't--"

He ripped his eyes wide open, and her ghost stared at him through lackluster brown eyes.

They were eyes that had been so much brighter in life, diamond chips of glittering illumination scattered across the irises and reflecting the light back at him in spear thrusts of feeling that stabbed right to his heart. Hollow now, circled with bruised shadow in a face of sunken thinness, they just looked desperate, without the inner sunshine she'd been known for.

She collapsed onto her knees, and despite himself Squall sat upright, his arms reaching automatically to help. But she was too far away, and not real, so he awkwardly folded his hands over his knees and commanded his twitching fingers to obey.

It was the hardest thing he'd ever done, sitting there just watching her lay there in a defeated heap, her muddy limbs splayed awkwardly, her shoulders jerking in an occasional hiccupping sob.

_There he is, bitch. _Ultimicea snarled. _Aren't you happy now? _

No! I don't want him to see me like this. I don't want him to--

_Stop you from killing yourself? Why do you think I brought you here? He's already tried before--he can't kill you, and he won't let you do it yourself. Go reconcile with him while you still have the chance. You hiked all the way here to find him. _

_You _hiked all the way here. Just leave him alone, ok? Just leave them all alone. I'm so tired of fighting you all the time.

_Then stop. _

No. No. Her eyes turned toward his face, beautiful and carved from stone, fierce like a lion's but soft at the core where it mattered. She'd never been strong like him, but if she needed the same iron might he exhibited in battle to protect him, she'd find it somehow.

The rainwater caressed his face like tears.

Just leave him alone, ok?

"Squall." she croaked. "Squall, I love you. Please help me."

_Crawl. You want to touch him. _

Rinoa dug her nails into the moist ground. If I touch him than you touch him. He doesn't want that.

_I'm going to rip his heart of his chest and eat it. _The threat was a singsong inside her head, cruelly, beautifully musical. _You remember what I told you about Quistis? Crawl to him now, or I'll help you kill yourself, and then she'll be vulnerable to me. _

You can't do that without killing yourself.

_You don't sound very sure. Do you want to risk your friend's life like that? _

Rinoa pictured sunny blonde, two headfuls of it, one sleek and long, the other blowing across angry traitor's eyes and the lightning zigzag of a scar identical to Squall's. The description was offered by her other awareness, and she thought angrily He's not a traitor.

_Seifer doesn't matter right now. Just think how he'll feel though when Quistis isn't his anymore though. Maybe his loneliness will drive him right back into my arms. He was comfortable there once, you know. She's just tricked him. _

Seifer loves Quistis.

_Seifer loves himself and power, you dumb little bitch. You'll all realize that eventually. _

The claws of her fingers dug muddy furrows into the land. The talon marks of her struggle softened under the continuing rain, eventually blending into one another, the lips of the wound growing back together in imperfect harmony.

She kept staring at him as tears slipped down her face, because it was the only thing she could do, the only thing she wanted to do, and even though she didn't want to touch him, she wished he would kneel next to her and cradle her in his soldier's arms like he used to do when she woke screaming from a particularly bad vision.

* * *

The drum beat pounding of a heavy fist against Quistis' door snapped Seifer from a peaceful sleep.

He rolled out of bed wearing nothing but the sheet, and then collapsed on the stinging pins and needles assault that was his left leg, cursing under his breath as he tried to slap life back into the limb.

Quistis sat up sleepily from her pillow, damp moonlight spearing through the window to paint her body in sleek pearl hues.

"Quisty? Quisty, ya' in there?" Zell yelled from the hallway.

The door rattled dangerously again.

She shared a panicked look with Seifer. "The door's lock is broken!"

Zell seemed to realize the same thing at exactly that same moment, and as the door begin to swing open, throwing a cone of weak buttery light from the hall across her room's carpet, Seifer dived for the bathroom.

He didn't quite make it in time, and the startled martial artist blurted out an astonished "Whoa! Quisty, what the hell's going on?" as he caught an eyeful of an unknown sheet-wrapped man booking it toward the only hiding spot.

Seifer's personality was too deeply-ingrained; he automatically snapped: "She's screwing me, Chicken Wuss, what the hell do you think?" and then slammed his mouth shut, too late.

Quistis saw Zell's eyes widen further in realization.

She covered her face with a hand.

Seifer sensed a lecture and headed it off before she could start. "It's not my fault he's so stupid he needs the facts of life explained to him."

Zell ignored him, fixated instead on his blushing friend--probably trying to get a glimpse of her naked breasts, Seifer guessed irritably.

The spiky-haired blonde looked horrified. "Ewww! Quis, you had sex with him?!"

Seifer supposed he should be amused that upon learning of the return of his supposedly dead former nemesis, the only thing Zell could think to do was screw up his face in disgust and lament over the fact that Quistis had slept with him.

Pretty fucking hilarious.

He dropped the sheet and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Dude!" Zell screamed, shielding his eyes.

"It's called a penis, Chicken Wuss. You'd know that if you had one."

"You want to see it, Alm_ass_y?" Zell demanded. "It's way bigger than that limp peanut you're trying to smuggle in your pubes, too."

Seifer turned toward the bed where Quistis still cowered, hiding her face, and snapped "How the hell did this degenerate into a conversation about Chicken Wuss Jr.?"

"How long has this been goin' on, Quisty?"

"Can I stab him?" Seifer interrupted, plowing through Zell's next question before it even had time to leave his mouth.

"Too bad you didn't really die." Zell said, narrowing his eyes.

"Too bad I couldn't take you with me." Seifer snarled back.

"Boys!" Quistis intervened, holding up her hands, the weary teacher assigned a class of rambunctious ten-year-olds vying for her favoritism in obnoxious displays of adolescent masculinity. She pinched the tension from the pressure points lining the bridge of her nose, and looked warily between them both. "Seifer, maybe you should put something on."

"Yeah; I don't want to die of assphycsheation from choking on my own puke."

"It's asphyxiation, Zell." Quistis corrected quietly, automatically.

"Why? I think you've already seen everything." Seifer answered her suggestion, glowering at Zell. And if you die of 'assphycsheation' right now, then at least you can't pollute the gene pool."

"Seifer, please, just put something on." Quistis pleaded, still flushing brightly as she kept a blanket pulled modestly up around her breasts and rooted around for her own clothes.

"So what the hell's going on?" Zell demanded, hovering in the doorway as though he were afraid to venture any farther into the room, like Seifer might be incubating some horrendous disease and any distance closed between them might infect the martial artist. "How come he's alive? Where did you hide him? And how come you didn't tell me what was going on, Quisty?" There was a note of hurt poisoning the last question, and Quistis felt a stab of regret as his wide-open eyes drilled her like a confused puppy's, and she remembered now why it was so difficult to stay angry with Zell despite his many stupid antics and foot-in-the-mouth moments. He was the kicked animal with its tail drooping forlornly between its legs when his friends excluded him, and he wore that abused puppy look now, his wounded eyes the spark that started the fire of Quistis' regret.

"Because you're stupid, and you have a big mouth." Seifer offered helpfully.

Anger stroked its glowing crimson fingers over Zell's cheeks, cradling his face in the valley of its searing palms.

He yanked the blanket that Quistis held to herself off the bed, twirled it for just a moment, and the snapped it with impressive aim at Seifer, the end whip cracking out across his genitals.

A serpent's hiss of air seeped from between his lips; he folded hard onto his knees, clutching himself, the green death glare he shot at Zell promising endless torture.

The spiky-haired blonde flipped Seifer the bird, then turned to hand the blanket back to Quistis, frozen in mid-pose stretching out an arm to the pile of her clothing, completely nude.

The flash fire heat of Zell's blush stained his cheeks. "Oh crap, Quisty, sorry…" he stammered, turning away.

"Fuckin' perv." Seifer hissed from the floor, and suddenly a muscular arm impacted Zell's calves, sweeping him flat onto his ass.

Zell sat bewildered for a moment, staring around him as though wondering what had just happened, then with an animal snarl, he lunged for the other man.

But no completely heterosexual man really wants to tackle a naked guy, and so he froze mid-way, his limbs contorted in the stagnant still frame of his half-attack, the horrified rage plastering his face hilarious to Seifer, who began to laugh uproariously.

His fist shot out, a hammering blow that snapped Zell's head back in a plume of blood. He heard a tooth land with a muffled thud to the carpeting, a slurred "You're _dead_, Alm_ass_y," and then 5' 5" of a man pushed beyond the limits of social boundaries leaped into a naked man's arms, shoving Seifer backward into the bathroom door.

Quistis heard Zell scream "Ahhhh! It touched me!!" as she hurriedly pulled her clothes on, and then the shatter of glass as the wrestling men knocked something off the counter in the bathroom.

She sighed, pinched the bridge of her nose again, and uncoiled her whip as she jogged over to separate them.

Why was this so damn hard? Why couldn't his memories just leave him the hell alone?

Instead, the reflective mirror glass splinters of his recollections buried themselves in his brain, bouncing a million replications of her beautiful face around the inside of his mind, until finally he imagined her into life, lying mere feet away begging him to help her.

Squall squeezed his eyes closed.

"Squall…please…"

It was a sibilant whisper, just a bullfrog's hoarse croak, and it tore him like deadly shrapnel. The fragments tore his heart, and the lacerations they shredded through the weakly drumming organ burned with their own poison, an acid venom that ate through his ribcage and plunged his heart into the boiling cauldron that was his stomach.

Her voice sounded so authentic, as good an imitation as any he'd ever heard. He'd once thought his imagination paled horribly next to the real thing, but somehow it seemed to have grown stronger over the past few weeks. It was a dim, faded reproduction of her vocal cords, but still, it sounded real--so he sat with his shaking arms cinched tightly around his legs, and his lashes pressed hard to the shadow moons carved beneath his eyes, and pretended that she was not just some fantasy of his lonely mind.

The talons of her hands froze in an eerie rigor mortis as she dragged herself toward him. The skeletal branches of her arms shivered with the strain of her struggles, her physical body and the indefinable, dying fire that was the spirit of Rinoa Heartilly at odds, polar opposites pulling against one another in a futile battle for dominance.

She held herself together with everything she had, anchoring herself to the ground with the desperate, bruised stubs of her fingers--sweat beaded along her forehead, stubbling her upper lip and crawling down the nape of her dirty neck. She felt the slug's trail pulse of it stumbling a halting path over her skin, and it reminded her of that woman's fingers prying up the bricks of the defensive wall Rinoa erected around her fragile mind.

"Please…" The word tasted like sour vomit, like blood, and more tears slid down her cheeks as she tried not to want his love so badly.

She needed him to leave. She wanted him to stay. Could a person split themselves in half, tear the organs right down the middle with nothing more than crushed promises and their own faulty willpower?

_Touch him. _

No.

_Doesn't he have a right to happiness? What about the fairytale? _The question was sneering, bitter.

Rinoa buried her face in the mud. There were no fairytales. She'd figured that out a long time ago.

"Squall…"

"_Look at me_!" The demand tore itself from her trembling mouth; it wasn't her scream, but Ultimicea had used her voice.

Horrified, Rinoa clamped down with all the power she could summon from her frail body, bracing herself physically and mentally against the invading force violating her body.

Too late. His startled eyes swung in a slow motion scan toward her, the spine snapping military straight, the mouth she wanted to kiss dangling in an 'o' of shock. The slack oval of his mouth drooped open and shut, guppy-like, and something drained from his face--resistance and pain and squinched-tight features melting under euphoria's roaring flame.

"Rinoa."

He couldn't stand it anymore; his body slithered a shaking path toward her on hands and knees, oxygen burning his throat like liquid fire. He wheezed air like an asthmatic, stretching his bloodless fingers toward the crown of her head and the limp, filthy hair that splayed around it in a dingy halo.

Hope slipped a hangman's noose around his neck until even the winded gasps choked down to nothing.

"Rinoa…Rinoa…" He kept saying her name, like those three syllables uttered over and over again would either dispel the illusion or throw the real woman into his arms, weeping gratefully.

Squall grazed wilted strands; the blue-black raven's wing gleam was gone, just the coarse texture of brittle straw threading his fingers now, the silk charred to a few pitiful, crispy strips.

He lifted her face between his palms, and she smiled at him through the gem studs of her tears, through the rain that still slashed in winking needles from the angry skies.

It was Rinoa's pale, strength less arms that looped a tremulous circle around Squall's neck, but it was Ultimicea who initiated the embrace.

And it was Ultimicea who smiled again as she tucked Rinoa's face into the crook of Squall's shoulder.

Rinoa whispered "No," into the musky woodland scent of his skin and collapsed bonelessly against him, closing her eyes. She wasn't sure who fainted against his warm body, woman or sorceress, but as the silent forest slowly vanished around her in ink spots of black that ballooned gradually larger until they encompassed her entire surroundings, Rinoa wondered if she'd just lost.

* * *

Three hours after forcing her way between the flailing knot of limbs that consisted of Seifer and a pissed off, horrified Zell, another knock startled Quistis from her perch on the rumpled bed, the interruption not even disturbing the glaring contest currently taking place between both men. She'd spent half an hour trying to explain the situation to her red-faced friend--the faked execution, the necessary disguise--before finally giving up and leaving them to their sulking.

Neither was interested in anything more than tearing the other man's face off.

She clipped her whip to the waistband of her pants and padded on bare feet over to the door, stepping gracefully around a seated Zell, who tapped his fingers in an endless cadence against his crossed knees, spelling out Seifer's bloody demise with each drumbeat landing.

Quistis sighed and opened the door a crack.

Seifer leaped to his feet, the sudden lit flare that smoldered his gaze unrelated to Zell for once. Fully clothed now, his muscles leonine and pulled suddenly taut beneath the gray shirt he wore, Seifer took a step forward, hesitated, then stopped and blurted out "Holy shit."

Zell, his anger rapidly spiraling down into confusion now, craned his neck around to see what the hell was going on.

Squall stepped out of the hallway, a flaccid Rinoa in his arms.

The petite sorceress looked awful, her hair snarled into a rat's nest of broken twigs and dirt clods, the healthy glow of her skin bleached to the ashen bone of death, dried blood sketching abstract designs across her arms and cheeks in crisscrossing auburn lines.

"Put her down on the bed." Quistis said immediately, shutting the door behind him and arranging pillows as Squall did so, tenderly setting her down with the gentleness of a parent laying a sleeping child down for a much-needed nap.

"Holy crap! Is she…" Zell said, scrambling to Quistis' side, his hands forming strained fists against the sides of his thighs.

"She's not dead." Squall replied quietly, his eyes fixated only on that pale, slumbering face as he lovingly smoothed unkempt bangs from her forehead. She was the only one who'd ever brought out the softness in him; to everyone else, Squall Leonheart was an undrilled column of granite, faultless in his emotionless sterility, aloof to all but the barest trickles of emotion--quiet anger and faint irritation, feelings that couldn't even crack the blasé mask of his face.

Quistis saw emotion in his face now. The warring factions of terror and joy clashed in bloody battle in the stony irises of his eyes; the rising sun of hope set his cheeks ablaze as grim reality pinched his lips into a hard, tight line.

They were all the emotions she'd once wanted for herself, directed at someone else. The last, lingering globule of selfish jealousy loosened its hold on Quistis' arteries, and dissolved in the river current rush of her blood stream.

"She has a chance now, Squall. We can save her." Quistis promised him, setting one hand lightly on his shoulder.

She was fucking everywhere, raping his mind, violating his body. The tiny fingers of humming awareness that were Ultimicea slammed electrified fishermen's barbs against the knots of his spine, buzzed against his teeth.

_Don't you fucking feel her?! _he screamed, but it was a warning only in his own mind, and Seifer knew they couldn't hear him now.

His eyes blurred. Quistis' slender back and the spun gold of her hair swam in front of him; she twisted like a melting wax candle, liquefying down into an ambiguous blur, smudging together with the dark blob that was Squall. They formed a sickly intimate melding of limbs, conjoined twins attached at hip and ribcage and ear.

He slammed a palm into his temple, like he could beat her right out of his skull, hammer her into oblivion behind his aching eye sockets.

_Seifer_. The whisper crawled inside his head, weaving a snake's trail of memory behind it.

_-Don't you want to play with the others, Seifer?-_

_-You're not my mother!-_

_-Crashing glass, the shards glittering like brilliant offerings at his feet, showing him the brooding failure in his eyes over and over again-_

_-Power surrounding him, engulfing him like her thighs, like her straining, arching back-_

_-I can make you great Seifer-_

_-The rising moon flash of Lionheart completing the final choreographed twirl in its killing dance, straight toward his neck-_

Seifer clutched his head, and sank to his knees.

_Get out…GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HEAD!!_

_You're letting me in. _

_Get out. Get out _now_, bitch! _

_You're hurting Rinoa's poor little ears. She's so delicate, so precious, you know. Is that why you wanted to fuck her all those summers ago? _

Seifer fell back on his ass, clenching his streaming eyes closed. His nose poured blood as she stuffed herself farther inside him, filled him like a gluttonous leech gorging until it exploded. _Get the fuck out! GET OUT OF ME!_

One hand dropped limply to the carpet, and touched cold steel.

He pried his gummed-shut eyes open with a painful rip to see Hyperion, glinting with watery inconsistency beneath his palm.

He blinked his eyes, wiped them with his free hand, stared down into the terrified, wild animal gaze that mirrored itself in the blade's moonlight glow. The cold fire of its touch ate his hand, numbed his fingers, traveled up his arm and into his heart. Jaws of ice snapped tight over the organ, and his fingers spasmed shut around the weapon's handle.

Seifer staggered unsteadily upright, trailing Hyperion's point like a stick dragged lazily through sand.

On the bed, Rinoa sat suddenly upright, her spine pulled rigid, the puppet answering the jerk of it's master's string.

But the eyes belonged only to her, and the frightened doe sheen of her gaze didn't want to die, even as those thick-lashed pools of drowning mahogany begged him to kill her.

He lunged, and she slid onto his blade, like butter, like water, drooping forward until her forehead touched that star bright finger too, the sharp edge splitting the skin there as well. He watched her brow weep blood down either side of Hyperion, listened to the wet meat squelch that reminded him of his mother's death.

Seifer twisted his gun glade with a deft flick of his wrist and heard the squeal of bone, the brittle twig crack of a breaking spine.

Ultimicea tore herself out of him, the violent uprooting driving him back down to his knees; he lost his grip on Hyperion.

The animal wail of Squall's grief gradually poked noisy holes into his hazy awareness as the ocean wave roar of the blood in his ears began to die down, one strangled ululation that might have been attempted speech or simply a guttural noise.

Seifer saw her eyes first, the horrified gaze of a stranger who has just witnessed someone commit an atrocity right in front of her.

She was looking at the traitor now as she stared at him, and he wanted to cry, because she'd always been the only person who'd never thought of him like that, even before she loved him.

He looked down at his trembling, blood-stained hands, and realized he wasn't the hero of the story anymore.

* * *

One month later, in a dilapidated shack surrounded by a fraying garden abandoned long ago by its caretaker, Seifer Almasy slipped a pistol beneath his chin, and pulled the trigger.

He didn't really want to die, so he sat there for a long time with that cold, cold barrel pressed tight into his flesh, thinking about suicide and the scent of strawberries. He could smell them from where he perched on the edge of a rickety cot, wild woodland berries that survived amidst the wilting foliage of the abandoned garden, saccharine temptation inside his nostrils.

He'd smelled it on her flesh too the last time she ever touched him, little hints of it caressing his olfactory senses as he slid her pants off, the artificially plastic mimic that was the best her shampoo could do.

The sun slipped its tentative fingers through the open door of his home, a comforting glaze across his cheeks.

He didn't really want to die, but he didn't have anything else left to do. He didn't have access to a proper disguise anymore, so he mostly lived like a common criminal, skulking about in the night and swiping necessities whenever someone looked the other way. He'd attempted world domination, and fucked it up. He'd fallen in love, and fucked that up too. He was an orphan, with no friends, money, or future.

So he did the only thing he could. He closed his eyes, held tight to the memory of her lips brushing his neck, and squeezed that curve of killing steel one final time.

He heard the failed click, and looked down to see that the fucking thing had jammed.

"Shit!" Seifer snarled, standing up and hurling the stupid thing as far as he could, out the door and into his pitiful square of dying plants and half-rotted vegetables.

One more thing he'd just fucked up. He could go root around for the gun, clear the jam, and try again, but what was the fucking point? He couldn't even commit suicide right.

Grumbling to himself, he snatched his coat and headed out into the cool morning air, slamming the door behind him.

Outside, tepid dawn stroked its hesitant touch across his scowling face, slithering over the bands of muscle in his arms and wrapping his torso in an embrace of promised heat. Ahead of him, the same early morning stroke stirred the branches on the trees ringing his shabby sanctuary, fluttering them in enthusiastic little waves of their gaunt arms.

They did that every morning, and he always wondered whether they were saying hello or good-bye.

His frown dug deeper trenches through his scar as a dog's greeting bark echoed off the trees and scythed through his ear drums, cutting like a drill bit through the brain, teasing out the headache that threatened at the back of his skull into his frontal lobes. He saw the titanic fuzz ball of the animal a moment later, a gargantuan collection of shaggy hair, loving eyes and the longest tongue Seifer had ever seen, all barreling straight toward him, the stupid mutt's tail whipping back and forth like a massive, enthusiastic flag.

"_No_." Seifer barked. "No, dammit, shit--_sit_, you annoying little fuck!"

The dog leaped right up into his arms, launching itself off the ground like a heat-seeking missile.

Seifer fell backward on his ass with the canine's hairy bulk clasped tight in his unwilling embrace. They formed a flailing tangle of limbs, the dog calling out a few confused yips as it tried to figure out how to extract itself from the chaos, Seifer yelling profanities at the top of his lungs while he tried to heave one hundred sixty pounds of slobbering pet off his cramping muscles.

"Deacon! Come here!"

The squirming animal finally unknotted itself from Seifer, and galloped off toward the voice calling out its name in the pre-pubescent soprano of childhood.

Spitting dog hair out of his mouth, Seifer rolled onto one elbow, still muttering vague threats toward the feathery banner of that tail and wiping one saliva damp sleeve angrily on the ground.

Through a break in the tree line, he saw the unruly black mop top and timid gray-blue storm pall eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy, standing hesitantly in the shadow of a towering evergreen. He tossed a wave shyly to Seifer, and squatted down next to the panting dog, who sat obediently at his heels.

Seifer was scowling as he slogged his way through the soggy leaves and mud puddles that were the results of last night's rainstorm. "How come he listens to you?" _That thing could hold the fuckin' kid down with one paw. And the kid probably isn't willing to stab it through the side of the head with a gun blade. _

The young teen shrugged, concentrating on the rhythm of his hands as he scratched along his dog's spine. Seifer could see two perfect clown's makeup circles of red enhancing the boy's lightly tanned skin, glowing like phosphorescent bulls eyes. "S-sorry." he stammered out. "I brought some flowers for the…for your mom and your friend."

Something heavy clamped around Seifer's chest. He glanced over the top of the boy's disheveled head toward the clearing ahead, just a sunny circle guarded on all sides by the shadowed sentinels of trees, holding two simplistic wooden slabs; tributes to his mother and to Raijin, crudely hacked headstones that would be the only memorials he'd ever see.

He didn't know where they were buried.

The misshapen lump of Raijin's monument boasted a spray of purple flowers in front of it, violet blossoms that somehow made the tilting headstone seem less pathetic.

For Seifer's mother, Seth Grendon had carefully arranged the delicate angel wing's fan of lilies, the stalks looped in their sash of yellow ribbon glistening with morning dew.

Seifer crossed his arms.

"If you don't like them, I can take them back! I just thought--" He was the stuttering adolescent with over-eager puppy dog eyes, always desperate to please, and something about the whole scenario swelled a lump inside Seifer's throat.

"They're fine." he snapped, because any gentleness in his voice might have begun to unravel the delusion of swaggering tough man he'd weaved around himself. Why let the kid know that he was such a fucking fake that most mornings he could barely drag himself out of bed, that not five minutes ago he'd tried to blow his brains out with a rusty old revolver?

There was awe in that gaze, the wonder of a younger sibling watching his older brother perform some seemingly impossible feat. It was selfish, and stupid, but somehow Seifer didn't quite want to let that go.

He sighed and shifted a squinty-eyed suspicious look toward the dog with its drooling smile cracked wide around bulldozer bucket teeth, a wolf's sneer that somehow only made the mutt look more amiable. The two had become staples in his life over the past three weeks; the kid was some middle school outcast from one of the nearby towns who'd wandered out to Seifer's little hellhole one day, a place he'd obviously visited a lot because he'd walked right in like he owned the place--and this gangly, stammering, bashful little idiot of a boy was not exactly the confident teen that Seifer had been, instantly owning any room he strutted into. He'd never seemed to recognize Seifer either, although at first he'd thought the kid's profuse apologies and stumbling exit from the ex-knight's new home was born of fear from the man that lurked like some baleful zombie clinging stubbornly to its few remaining shreds of humanity. He'd since figured that the teenager reacted like that to just about everyone; he reminded Seifer a little of Raijin's infamous awkwardness around women, and maybe that was why he hadn't bothered sending him and his stupid dog away when they kept showing curiously up.

Some days he felt like some fucking museum display, enclosed in his case of protective glass to be ogled.

"So…what are you doing today?" Seth asked quietly, falling into step behind Seifer as he turned and headed back toward his little shack.

_Don't know. _

His days now usually consisted of trying not to dream when he finally laid down to sleep at night.

"I just thought we could maybe…go fishing or something. There's a pond a little ways from here. But if you don't want to--"

"Don't you have school or something?" Seifer demanded, cutting him off rudely.

"No. I mean, ye-yeah, but I'm home schooled, so my hours are different. It only takes me a couple of hours to finish all my work, then I'm free."

He spent a moment pondering the teen's offering. He could spend the day idly whiling away his hours in front of the shining silver coin of some faceless pond, his bobber riding the tiny ripples of imperfection its globe created in the water, listening to an annoying kid stutter his way through the changing tones of puberty, or--

Or he could hole up in his shitty little home, the mercury arrow of Hyperion with its blade stabbed through rotting wood confronting him with images of Rinoa's splitting forehead, separating like flimsy tissue paper around the glossy finish of his murder weapon. He could hole up in that collapsing hovel of mildew and bad dreams, the disintegrating tilt of its foundation like the falling card house of his life, and he could remember her mouth, smiling just for him, and he could remember her eyes the last time he'd seen them--when they wouldn't even look at him, because she had just enough feelings left for him to spare him from the revulsion there.

So he did the only thing he could; he shrugged, gave the smiling dog one last warning glare, and said "Sure. What the hell. Go grab your poles."

* * *

Quistis pictured his hands while in the background Xu plotted out war strategies and battalion arrangements, all the things that should have been important to her but really weren't anymore; the pale tiger stripes of his battlefield scars and the hilly calluses of his violent palms seemed far more significant to her wandering mind.

She remembered the raw squelch of Rinoa's body opening around his gun blade, and she remembered the frictal slide of her heart against her ribcage as it plunged into the pit of her stomach. She remembered the look on Rinoa's face, the loose flapping lips of a beached guppy, and she remembered the look on his face, worst of all: the glaze-eyed madness of temporary insanity bleeding into what-have-I-done horror.

And what had she said to him, that final day she'd seen him, the last time she'd laid eyes on the burned-out fever in the dead glass of his gaze, on the familiar scar that reminded her of another face, contorted in horror while Squall lunged against Quistis' restraining hold? _"I think you should leave, Seifer."_

His tired eyes told her he understood, but his lips curled into the snarling rictus of his old sneer, a bitter simulacrum of the real thing. _"I just did what none of you had the balls to do." _

He held onto his pride, because it was the only thing he had left anymore.

He didn't even have her anymore, when just hours before that fateful slip of a blade, she'd promised herself that she'd never let him slide back into his own little island of solitude, that peninsula of distrust and dissatisfaction that had allowed Ultimicea to sink her claws in.

_Quistis, what did you do? _another part of her asked.

She'd split in half the moment that razor blade of pure moonlight pierced Rinoa's flesh and entered her spine, peeling apart around two separate Quistis's, one that recoiled in disgust from the pain and terror and inky tendrils of insanity draping themselves in the black gauze strips of eternal night over the irises of his green eyes--and one that couldn't quite bear to leave him kneeling there alone over her body, panting like a wild animal as his entire body twitched in earthquake seizures.

But with her hands full of a struggling Squall, she'd done just that--left him there, choosing the dark-haired boy over the blonde again, turning her attention to the quiet, brooding student with the lightning strike scar instead of the loud, brash teen at the back of her classroom calling out additions to her lecture that he thought were funny.

The bony dagger of Xu's elbow stabbed Quistis out of her reverie.

She jolted into a conversation of soldiers and war and death--always death, the eternal shadow stalking the curves of her heels, no matter how quickly they drummed pavement--and noticed Cid looking strangely at her.

Xu concluded their meeting and a few chairs scraped in quiet dismissals, a tune she remembered well, the metallic squeal of freedom that used to be accompanied by his loud, huffy "_Finally_."

She'd probably never hear his voice again, and that knowledge poked its acid nails into her skin, beneath her fingernails, stuffing every liquid centimeter of the dissolving slag of her guts, firing those poison-coated spikes into the burning-sun center of her heart. His face was an explosion beneath her ribs, a conflagrant slideshow of predator's eyes and smiling lips that dropped with painful echoes into the nuclear kiln of her chest.

Irvine touched her elbow as he passed, dropping a brotherly kiss on her head.

She smiled up at him, but the contortion of her lips was a stretched, painful thing, just a spectral memory of anything real, and she knew it must have looked horrible.

Xu, Nida, and Irvine--filling in for an absent Squall--filed up creaking steps out of the musty closet that was the small wine cellar they gathered inside, just a 12 foot by 12 foot cube that embraced the phantom spots of dust specks floating under the light of a single naked bulb. The filthy arc of wine bottles beneath their mantles of spider web and dirt flashed the old blood glow of aging alcohol here and there, rusty gem flares of light that flashed like the streaks of falling stars.

It had taken Garden a few weeks to re-mobilize after the devastation of their home, but eventually SeeD had adapted as only life-long training could allow, and now squads of soldiers waiting patiently for their orders blended into the masses of Deling City like normal civilians. Galbadia's heavy-handed occupation of the city was not welcome by many, and it was these men and women who secretly opened their arms to the mercenary children who would die for them.

Sometimes right beneath the enemy's nose was the best place to hide.

"Sir." Quistis addressed Garden's headmaster respectfully, standing politely and clasping her hands behind her. "I have an unofficial request, if you don't mind."

The permanent raccoon circles of obsidian carved beneath Cid's eyes emphasized his age, made him look frail, like a beaten old man, but he smiled kindly at her as she stood before him. "Of course, Quistis. What do you need? And please, don't be so formal."

"If you'll recall the attempts that were made on my life almost a year ago, this started long before Ultimicea. Even with her gone, Galbadia is still organized, clever and dangerous. Their soldiers are almost…inhuman sometimes. The students from Trabia Garden that kidnapped me months ago alluded to something strange happening there; at first I just wrote them off as children's stories, but at this point we need answers, and I think that may be a place to start. I'd like to enroll there as a transfer student."

Cid was nodding as she spoke. "At this point, I don't see how it could do any harm. You're a bit old for a student, obviously, but I imagine you could pass yourself off as seventeen or eighteen--you'll need I.D. papers."

A faint blush stained her cheeks. "Actually, Xu's already taken care of that."

He looked more amused than annoyed--in the past, that sort of bypass of authority would have accompanied a reprimand, but now he had neither the time nor the energy to waste on something so trivial. Instead he sighed and just nodded again, looking hopelessly elderly behind the owl flicker of his tired eyes. The lines patterned over his paternal features in uncolored tattoo tracks of stress crushed her heart down into a knotted labyrinth of new pains and old, jabbing aches.

But what could she say to him? _Don't worry, sir, everything will turn out ok. _She didn't know that. And she certainly couldn't slip the lie between the gummed-shut slash of her lips, his warm breath and roughly gentle hands the adhesive that pressed her mouth tightly closed.

No, she certainly couldn't say that, not with Rinoa dead and Quistis still in love with her killer.

"I assume you two have taken care of matters, then?"

"Yes sir. We didn't intend to go over your head--but I wanted everything taken care of quickly, and you--"

"Haven't been easy to get ahold of." he supplied for her, sighing again. "I've been…busy. Running a war isn't an old man's job, Quistis."

_It's Squall's job. _she added silently, but she knew neither of them blamed Garden's commander for shirking his duties.

"You'll be departing after tonight's…ceremony?" Cid asked, pushing his glasses up the sagging beak of his nose.

"Yes."

"Good." He smiled again, and it wasn't quite as awful as hers had been, but it wasn't the sun-drenched coil of lips that she remembered from a long ago beach. Then the laughter of children and the scent of his wife's coconut perfume had been the tinder that lit the spark of his full-toothed father's grin. This…this was just a meager shell of what it had once been, a skeleton expression that etched premature age more deeply around his eyes. "Good luck to you, Quistis. Be careful."

Careful was such a useless term, she thought as she ascended the noisy spiral of wooden slats that groaned and twitched beneath her feet. Hadn't she always been careful of her reputation and her lectures and her thoughtful, evenhanded punishments meted out to disobedient students? Hadn't she always styled her hair carefully, each strand molded into one perfect, shining entity that didn't dare wither even under the warm and sweaty lights of the classroom that had been her real home for years? Hadn't she always approached even combat with the cautious rationale of a born strategist, instead of rushing in with weapon swinging and the passionate fire in her eyes scorching those that didn't fall beneath the executioner's chop of her blade?

Quistis Trepe had been careful all her life. And then one negligent moment, a crack in the flawless, plated armor of her feelings, and everything came tumbling down like the scattering cinders of a destroyed house. It took just one hammer blow against the ice of her protective shell, and then the entire thing starred into ever-widening cracks of fault lines and weak spots.

She sighed quietly to herself as she opened the door leading back out into an empty bar. Seifer's stubborn, thick skull had delivered that hammer blow, and one of her best friends had paid for it.

* * *

On her favorite beach one month after her death, Rinoa Heartilly's corpse burst into a flaming torch that sculpted fairytale figures out of the night sky's onyx clouds.

Squall lowered his hand as the last of his Fira spell fizzled from his system, and watched her burn.

To his right, Zell sniffled out his grief in quiet, hiccupping sobs that tunneled through his ear like burrowing earthworms. The cherry throb of her funeral pyre sketched his friends in shadowy ghost figurines around him, the lunar glare of their skin and moist, blinking eyes reflecting the entire scene back at Squall's blank gaze in a thousands slivers of sensation. Quistis' eyes held pieces of Rinoa's slack hand and a few strands of her waving, shining hair. Irvine's sympathetic stare gave him one of her dainty feet, and half a curve of her charring, shriveling lips. Zell's watering, squinched-tight look offered a blistered cheekbone, and the memory of how it felt, unblemished, beneath his fingertips.

He crossed his arms like those dark slashes of stiffly-ironed sleeve could block the roar of flame and the stench of smoking, melting flesh.

That was Rinoa in there with her skin dripping off in melted-wax chunks of black-blistered moonlight, with her hair coiling into tight, brittle ringlets that curled all the way to the top of her head before sloughing off.

For weeks he'd held those motionless hands while she laid on the sterile cot that was her makeshift hospital bed, the fairytale sleeping beauty with her eyes closed in peaceful slumber as Ultimicea's magic sustained her, sewing back together the ugly, ragged lips of the wound Seifer's gun blade had ripped.

But her healing powers stopped there, either because she wanted them too, or because with her host body dying around her, Ultimicea herself began to slip away. The reserves of her magic could only hold for so long when she had nothing to feed off, and, slowly, the decomposition of Rinoa's body began to show: the rose bloom in her cheeks gradually faded to the dull, ashy pallor of a cadaver, the fingers he stroked wordlessly in his own twisting into the claws of rigor mortis while his heart shriveled more and more in his chest.

And finally, finally, he'd given up. After he'd promised her he wouldn't, after he'd bent countless times over her unmoving, cold lips like his was the prince's kiss that would awaken the princess and sworn to her that he knew, he _knew_,somehow, somewhere deep inside, she was still alive.

Another broken promise in the pile of shattered dreams that lay between them.

The heat radiating from her injected itself into his knees; pliable with warmth, they swayed drunkenly under him.

On his right, Quistis glanced worriedly over. The hand she rested on his shoulder shifted, moved in a steady grip to his elbow, and he thought about thanking her, but didn't.

No words would ever make it past the scorched hollow of his throat.

A log popped loudly, shooting a meteor shower of sparks up into the air.

He could still see a foot and the curve of a calf, once silky, when something began to emerge from the fire.

It was a horrible birth, filled with belching smoke and the snapping, crackling soundtrack of splitting wood, streamers of flame curling after it in mockery of a trailing umbilical cord.

Beside him, Quistis shifted restlessly, and Zell stiffened as around him the beach came alive with shocked gasps.

It shuffled from the yellow-orange tongues of her bonfire, pale and wispy and skeletal, the gleaming pearlescent of maggots beneath moonlight.

Jaws of rage snapped themselves tight around Squall's heart. This was what had felt the warm splatter of his tears and the tender caress of his palms over its stolen hair and mouth--this was the _bitch _that had robbed him of the one thing he'd allowed to let matter in his life.

Quistis screamed, and he felt the reverberation of her landing in the sand beneath his feet as she crumbled to both knees. Irvine lunged toward her as somewhere down the beach Squall's father screamed his name--and suddenly he was running into the heart of that blazing bonfire, into the furnace heat of its birthplace, the knotted grimace of his lips locking open in a snarl he'd seen before on Seifer's face: this was pure murderous rage, stretching its venom fingers down into the very core of his soul.

The ethereal figure brushed past him with the smell of burning flesh, and he felt his right shoulder sizzle painfully.

Quistis screamed again, and through the hazy veil fury dropped over his eyes, he could see the figure on its knees now, crawling toward her, its spidery fingers digging for purchase in the loose sand. Someone bombed it with Thundara, and the banshee wail of its scream reached cold hands down his throat and ripped his stomach loose.

He grabbed it with his bare hands, scorching his palms, and the bestial rage that blasted into snarling life like a hibernating dragon awakened from its sleep unfurled titanic wings inside his chest; he elbowed a SeeD aside as the humming of his veins burst ripely, like rotten fruit, and now Squall screamed as every spell stocked inside him poured free in one crushing wave roll of power.

Its crashing tsunami surged over the pitiful, emaciated spirit outline clinging to one of Quistis' feet, consuming the young woman as well.

Two screams shredded his ear drums, prolonged and like nothing he'd ever heard before as magic continued to jackhammer out of his pores. Gasping, he tried to rein it back, tried to stuff it back inside like a man frantically trying to reposition his spilled intestines, because one of those pained shrieks had been the feral scream of a friend.

Through his streaming eyes he saw Zell throw himself into the jet stream path of magic, his howl an animal ululation that echoed for miles over the water.

Behind him, Rinoa continued to burn.

Zell had Qustis by the arms now, his face frozen into the same rigor mortis of Rinoa's hands, the stiff, frozen still frame of permanent agony. He jerked her with every ounce of strength in his straining biceps as Squall's magic continued to batter him with its angry fists, and slowly, slowly, Quistis' boot began to inch down over her heel.

The wraith of Ultimicea saw its halting, inexorable progress and dug in with fingernails that no longer existed; she shrieked again, and that eerie demon roar would echo on forever in his ears, for the rest of his life.

The boot gave a final jerk and flew off; Zell tumbled backward with Quistis safely in his arms, and Exeter boomed loudly the second they were clear.

Squall's veins, finally drained of everything inside them, closed up once more, and he collapsed in the sand, panting heavily.

The sputtering, candle-flame flicker of the sorceress' ethereal silhouette scuttled in frantic circles, screaming and hissing imaginary spittle through the smoke screen of its wide open lips. The hole of light torn from the shadow by Irvine's gun and fringed in the radiance of Rinoa's pyre repaired itself; Irvine sighted, fired again, and yelled orders to several SeeD students standing nearby.

His words slinked inside Squall's head, noiseless under the monster roar of blood inside his ears and the crackling thunder of the flames eating her body. He pulled himself to his knees, stumbling to his feet as several spells slammed into Ultimicea with the shattering reports of grenades.

A _crack _like a lightning-struck tree thrust itself with the violence of a chisel into his head, and through the dissipating circle of the magic flung at her, Squall could see that she'd disappeared.

On a cot stained with the saline tarnish of sweat and tears, Seifer Almasy sat bolt upright, clutching his chest like he was dying.

He rolled off his lumpy, uncomfortable bed onto the floor with a thud that rocked the unstable foundation of his home, the smoking ashes of his pulverized heart leaking nuclear heat into his body.

His scream stretched his vocal cords to their very limits.

Curled on the floor in a fetal knot of agony, Seifer felt his body rip itself apart, slowly stitch itself back together again, and then tear the new sutures with a sadism that splashed vomit into his throat. He turned his head, and puked his dinner all over musty floorboards.

Dimly, through the frail shroud his failing consciousness flung over his face, Seifer thought _Somebody died. Please, please, Hyne, don't let it have been Quistis. Just don't fucking let it have been her. _

Mercifully, oblivion wrapped her cold fingers around his throat, and squeezed the intelligent glow of his eyes down into passed-out incomprehension.


	24. Chapter 23

**A/N: I apologize for taking so long to post this--it's been done for quite some time, but I've had a lot going on in my personal life that just sort of kept me from getting around to doing it. The next chapter is also done; I'll be posting that one right away too. Sorry again for the delay--hope you guys haven't forgotten about me! **

**Chapter Twenty Three**

Deling City

Galbadia

Zell woke from dreams of giant, two-legged hot dogs chasing him through an endless nightmare line-up of lunch ladies refusing him meals to see Irvine's palm hurtling at the side of his head.

He yelped, rolled away from it, and found the end of his bed.

It took him several long, disorientated moments to realize that he was upside down on the floor with his blankets wrapped in snug winter mufflers' coils around his neck, and that his normally laid-back friend was glaring at him with the kind of sharp-edged hostility that had been Seifer's trademark.

"What the hell?" Zell demanded, righting himself and mussing his sleep tousled hair with bare hands. "What's your problem, man?"

"You were supposed to be awake three hours ago, Dincht. I've been looking everywhere for you."

Zell blinked back memories of belligerent green eyes superimposed over the dulled fatigue of Irvine's brown gaze, and pinched himself hard, like that could somehow destroy all his remembrances of Garden's most famous traitor. It was just too bad nothing could erase the needle point of Hyperion, shoving and twisting its way inside Rinoa's body like some sort of inanimate rapist.

He crossed his arms and scowled sleepily. "Yeah, 'cause my hiding place was just plain _genius_, Kinneas."

Zell wondered vaguely if seeing Seifer all the time caused one to act like him, too. He certainly hoped not.

Irvine sighed and ran a hand over his face, his normally clean-shaven cheeks beginning to prickle with their own little mantle of beard, laid out in dark patches here and there that made Zell blink in confusion. Irvine was always very particular about his physical appearance, even after he'd begun seeing Selphie exclusively; it was simply part of his charm, part of the suave sophistication Zell had always wished he possessed. To see him unkempt, with the bruised paintbrush strokes of mottled purple-black under his eyes made everything seem just that much worse.

"You were supposed to be on recon today. Remember? Keeping an eye on that thing they're building out in the ocean. I thought something might have happened. I ran around the whole damn city lookin' for you, and you're in here snorin' away like a baby."

It was hard to stay angry at the man when he looked so damn _tired_. Zell untangled himself from his covers and stretched both arms over his head as his jaw cracked wide in a sleepy yawn. "Sorry man. I just lost track of time. It's been kinda' rough these past couple of weeks, you know?"

Irvine sighed again, and clapped the shorter man briefly on one shoulder. "Yeah, I know."

"So who took over for me then?" Zell asked, standing in the center of the room and scratching his head as he tried to remember where his pants were buried under the cesspit of dirty laundry and fast food wrappers that was his temporary home. The house belonged to some little old grandmotherly type who rented the upstairs loft to him cheap--in exchange for a bit of company in the evenings, which generally culminated in either a card game that she fell asleep over, or anti-government rambles that usually put Zell to sleep.

At least he didn't suffer from insomnia, like most of his friends probably did.

"Bria offered, actually."

"No friggin' way!" Zell shouted, tripping over a wayward shoe and landing face first in the pants he'd been searching for. "She's not SeeD--she shouldn't be--"

"Relax, man." Irvine said, patting the air with his palms, the motion of his hands eventually calming the splotches of red garishly streaking his friend's face. "Squall's keeping an eye on things."

That sobered Zell, who looked suddenly troubled as he spit dirty trousers from his mouth, the sketch marks of grief that had etched themselves in deep around his eyes furrowing into cavernous channels of premature age.

Squall, who'd pulled himself away from them all, surrounding himself in his own private bubble of solitude that no one dared penetrate. His stoic reputation might have been legendary, but even before Rinoa he'd never been quite so…withdrawn. It was like he didn't really exist anymore, like he'd drawn out his own personal black hole and stepped through it into a shadow world where people became simply puppets performing their expected duties, without any real vivacity.

That was all he was now; a puppet, still in control of his own strings, but without enough energy to give enough of a shit to do much beyond go through the motions in stiff, almost-movements that didn't even seem quite human.

Since Rinoa's death, he hadn't spoken more than three words to any of them. And with Quistis off at Trabia Garden now, Zell began to feel the orphanage gang slipping through his fingers, splitting off into their own little entities--a chain of islands come unstrung in a vicious hurricane.

Hell, sometimes he even missed Seifer, until he remembered that spear of heather light piercing her stomach, knifing apart the subcutaneous layers of her muscles and squealing against the headboard propped behind the broken mast of her spine, folded over Seifer's weapon like the ruined leg of some cheap card table.

Irvine was staring at him again when Zell came to. "Dincht, quit eatin' your pants and let's get going."

He frowned and rolled onto his back to wriggle into the article of clothing, standing up halfway through the motion and hopping around wildly on one leg while he attempted to stick his other foot through.

"So where's Bria then?"

"Down at the docks. Don't worry; she promised me she wouldn't try anything. She's safe; I made sure before I left."

"Good." Zell grunted, straining as he tried to zip the fly on his pants. They seemed unnaturally tight today, and he patted his stomach in bewilderment for a moment, trying to figure out if all his hot dog consumption had finally decided to bite him in the ass and pack on a few extra pounds to his lean frame.

_Whoops. _he realized a second later, sheepishly pulling the legs back down.

They were Bria's pants.

* * *

"Yep. That's a…T-1X859C." Zell mumbled thoughtfully, lowering his binoculars as he squinted out over the water wearing its painted canvas of intermingled grays and deeper shades of black and midnight violet, the moon a solid pearl scratched into its calm surface.

Irvine tapped him lightly on the back of his head, pulling his hat down over his eyes. "You just made that up."

"Did not!" Zell hissed, looking huffy as his friend snapped his fingers and he reluctantly handed across the binoculars.

Several miles out at sea, the ocean was a watery beehive of activity, vehicles buzzing to and fro around a half-constructed building of elegant spires and gothic-inspired arches; from the docks where Zell, Irvine and Bria hunkered carefully in night camouflage gear, they could just barely make out the dots of busy workers zipping back and forth between cinder blocks and wooden platforms. The unfamiliar vehicle Zell had captured in his binoculars made an abrupt about-face and headed back toward the structure, the frothy rooster tails of its passage cutting erratic canyons through tranquil breakers.

They sat there watching it in silence a moment, Bria's hand stealing her way around Zell's warm hand, threading through the callused fingers, like she needed an anchor and he was the grappling hook mooring her to earth. She'd been doing that a lot lately, and it vaguely concerned him, though he wasn't sure why--he liked the pressure of her soft hands cradled inside his, the beginning of cream-whipped silk where the rough sandpaper of his own palms ended. But it was uncharacteristic, and maybe he was just being superstitious and stupid, but somehow it seemed an ominous portent--everyone around him had lost someone, after all. Cid and Edea, Quistis and Seifer, Squall and Rinoa…

No one really got their happily-ever-after it seemed. That scared him, because looking at her in the highlighting moon glow that filtered down through gray overcast, she was so beautiful, and his heart ballooned a little in his chest. The tinsel illumination of the skies sketched her half-permanently into the shadowed background of the docks, and he tried not to remember Squall's howls of agony as Rinoa's blood drooled into a crimson pond on top of stained blankets.

"So what do you think's going on?" she whispered, squeezing his fingers and snapping him out of his daydream with a lightning strike jolt that snapped his spine straight.

"Dunno." Irvine replied quietly, rubbing his jaw. "Nobody's really been able to get much information. I think we're going to have to put someone in there undercover."

"You mean, posing as one of the workers?" she asked slowly, the pinched line of her lips thoughtful.

"Somethin' like that." Irvine agreed. "We could send in a couple of SeeD's--that way no one's going in without back-up if the shit hits the fan. They load equipment onto those little ships over there-" He indicated the vehicles Zell had tried to identify with a stab of one finger, "every morning at about 0700. We could put someone to work with them, and they could just board one of the ships and spend the day helping build and jest sorta' checkin' things out."

"Who's gonna' go? We're too famous. Someone might recognize us."

"Nah." Bria said, half-smiling in the darkness. "Just slap a fake beard on you, Zell, and no one's going to realize who it is without the baby face."

He shot a scowl at her, mildly irritated. His lack of ability to grow facial hair was still a rather sore subject, especially considering how much Seifer had exploited that particular insecurity. His inability to tolerate jibes about his manhood had led to more than a few wrestling matches.

"She's right, actually." Irvine said thoughtfully, easing out of the crouch he'd been hunched in for the better part of an hour. "I mean, you really wanna' trust somethin' like that to a newb, Dincht?"

"Guess not." He rubbed his chin. "So, you thinkin' just you and me then, sneak in for a day or so and find out whatever we can?"

"Yeah. You, me, mebbe Squall." Irvine's quick glance told Zell what his mouth didn't: _It's not like the guy couldn't use a distraction. _

Zell nodded thoughtfully. "We could dress like chicks or something--you know, just to really confuse people."

Irvine glared at him. "Is that your solution every time, Dincht? When in doubt, dress like a lady?"

Zell crossed his arms and scowled. "Well, they're not gonna' suspect us if we're women, right? 'Sides, you look like a girl anyway--you don't even have to wear a wig."

"Not happening." Irvine said firmly, flicking his ponytail off his shoulder. "Squall would never go along with that anyway."

"Maybe you could send an actual woman in." Bria suggested into the silence, a little hesitantly, because she could already guess Zell's reaction.

He looked over at her, frowning, squeezing her hand more tightly as worry scrawled its thick lines through his forehead. "You? No way, Bria."

"No one will pay any attention to me." she insisted. "There are plenty of medical volunteers right now who are more than capable of helping wounded SeeD's; they don't really need me there. I need something to do before sitting around twiddling my thumbs drives me insane, Zell."

Irvine glanced thoughtfully between the two. "She's got a point. Look, Dincht, it really shouldn't be that risky. She can just act like one of the workers, maybe get a little inside information, and then jest slip away when it's time to load up again. We can still go with her, if it makes you feel better. We'll split up, cover a little more ground that way."

Bria stared at him as his guts tied themselves into complicated loops. What was he supposed to say? How could he tell her 'Yeah, sure, go ahead, that's cool,' when he wanted her as far from the war as possible, when he wanted to wrap her in a cocoon's embrace of absolute safety, a bubble of sterility that would never, ever echo his screams the way that dingy hotel room had hurled Squall's in animalistic ricochets?

The thought of losing her scared Zell more than his first hesitant, awed steps into Garden, more even than facing down a power-mad Seifer wondering if he'd watch his friends die around him on that half-moon blur of silver as it arced in lunar dances around them.

But she wasn't his to lose--he didn't own her, and so, even though it stabbed a hot poker through his throat and trickled the smoking ashes of his windpipe down into his gut, Zell looked away and nodded, scowling.

"It'll be ok." Irvine said quietly, clapping him on the shoulder and squeezing lightly for a moment.

_Is that what Rinoa told Squall just a couple of hours before Seifer killed her? _Zell wondered darkly.

* * *

Seifer watched the red and white dome of his bobber disappear as the slack in his line pulled taut, half-rising from the log he'd procured as his seat an hour earlier. The sun-warmed sphere with its gold capped surface gleaming like earth's purest metal popped back up, sank abruptly again, and he felt the pole go slack in his hands as his line kinked into loose curlicues.

"Shit!" he snarled, throwing the stupid thing down and kicking it for good measure as Seth and Deacon looked curiously on from their own spot halfway across the tranquil pond. The mutt wagged his tail experimentally, cocking his head as he stared askance at the fuming young man. "The fucking thing broke my line again. I swear to Hyne, it's playing with me."

This was why he'd always hated fishing--what was supposed to be a relaxing pastime always turned into a frustrating battle of wills between him and some idiotic trout that was too stupid to care that he'd once killed lots of people trying to take over the world. Enemies might cower in fear before his vast reputation and overwhelming presence on the battlefield, but something with a brain the seize of a pea simply didn't give a shit when Seifer threatened to rip out its spinal cord and shove it up its ass.

Maybe that was why Chicken Wuss had always spent more time trying to punch him than being scared of him. A fish's brain and the microscopic dust speck Chicken Wuss considered a 'mind' probably had a lot in common.

Seifer sat down again, scowling and stretching his long legs out in front of him. He didn't want to think about Chicken Wuss right now, because the last time he'd seen the tattooed little freak, he'd been standing frozen in horror's pale rigor mortis on the other side of her, the flaxen glint of his hair like a second sun eclipsing her own sleek mane.

He couldn't stand thinking about Quistis. Funny how much it hurt, weeks after the abrupt severance of their 'relationship' or however the hell one classified the out-of-control roller coaster that was every emotional interaction between them. He'd once had the world at his fingertips--and lost it, and that had been just a single needle prick of sensation in one finger. This…this was fucking acupuncture dipped in poison.

"Do you want to stop?" Seth asked tentatively from across the pond.

Seifer closed his eyes and tilted his face up into the sun. "Nah. I'll just sit here for a while."

And picture blonde hair and the frigid ice water of her eyes, the only things he seemed able to form clear images of these days, perfectly rendered artist's sketches scratched into the backs of his lids. _Don't think about that bitch. She thinks you're shit now. _

She probably always had deep down, Seifer thought, a faint frown scrawling itself between his brows. She'd just been better at hiding it than most people.

The sun brushed its tepid caress down the sides of his face, warm like her fingers on his skin, searing like her smile burning in his chest. Its brand was still there, but faint, because it was hard to remember the expressions she'd worn before the revulsion that plastered itself across her face like the splatters of Rinoa's blood slithering down over his hands.

He shifted slightly, eyes still closed, trying to transfer his weight off the piece of bark jabbing into his ass.

_Stop _thinking _about her! _Seifer ordered himself, one lip curling into the half-snarl of a wary dog. It shouldn't be so damn hard to take control of his mind--as a student at Garden he'd always done whatever the hell he pleased, any thoughts of guilt over the constant shirking of authority that might have plagued another person flicked neatly aside. Then he'd been in control of everything--his body, his shrewd mind, the Disciplinarian Committee and a good portion of Garden's populace, and now…now he was just spinning mindlessly in some abyss he just couldn't seem to claw his way out of.

It was all her damn fault. Quistis and her beautiful lips and her fucking innocence and her caution and her intelligence…he didn't have the energy to hate her with the sun's heat puddling his muscles into kneaded clay around him, but the bitterness festering in his stomach would need to go somewhere eventually, before he burst with the force of it like some stinking, gangrenous wound.

Seth's soft voice pulled Seifer away from his own little world where he kept trying to remember the way her boring lectures had always pissed him off and not how he wanted to die as he watched her cradling Squall's thrashing, screaming body in her arms. Hyne--the way she'd looked at him…hadn't any of them _known_? Were they so fucking stupid they couldn't sense the sorceress' rotting presence inside the sweet, pretty little shell of Rinoa Heartilly? What had she _wanted _him to fucking do? Wait for Ultimecea's ugly, fatal claws to hook into the meat of her chest and rip her into a gaping black cavity the same way she had him?

His throat burned.

"Seifer?"

His eyes snapped open, and he glared at the shy teenager through the red-tinged haze of the sun's heat where it draped itself over his lids.

"How did your mom die?"

The softness in his voice was natural timidity, but something else as well, Seifer thought, crossing his arms over his chest and closing his eyes again.

How the hell was he supposed to answer that question? _I stabbed her, actually; but don't worry, it was an accident--I was aiming for my dad. _How did he explain to this naïve, too-gentle kid about the gurgling of death cries and the vibration of steel against your hand as it slit your mother's spine in half?

"A soldier killed her." he said succinctly instead. Broken-down, fucked-up wanna-be fairytale knight and soldier were interchangeable, weren't they? He'd been trained to kill since childhood--'soldier' was the very essence of what remained of his perforated, useless soul. It was all he could really be.

"During the Sorceress War?"

"Yeah." _Something like that. _Seifer hunched in on himself a little more tightly.

"Mine too." Seth confessed, looking down at his feet.

The ex-knight cracked his eyes once more and studied the kid's downcast eyes and listless stirring of one sneakered toe in the dirt at his feet. He drew wide rings with it, overlapping circles like the endless track of a tireless racer.

He'd never really bothered to ask about the teen's home life before; was he supposed to give a shit? He didn't really give a flying fuck about Seth's little sister who personally sewed Deacon his own outfits, or how his mother fed him cookies and milk each day or whatever shit went on in that household that would shun him the moment its authority figure discovered just who Seth snuck off to visit with each weekend. Learning now that they had something in common surprised him a little.

"This guy shot her and my dad because he thought they were traitors."

_He probably didn't have any idea of what a fucking 'traitor' is. _Seifer thought wryly.

"So you're an orphan. Me too. Sucks ass, doesn't it?"

"Yeah. My older sister takes care of me, though. She goes to university during the week, so she's not around much. She just leaves my assignments for me and then looks at them when she gets home." He looked up at Seifer finally, absently patting Deacon's head where it lay cradled between his front paws. "Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

_I had one, but I let him die too. _Then of course there was the infamous Orphanage Gang…he was sure they'd welcome him back with open fucking arms. Something about killing someone close to the children you'd grown up with seemed to sever all familial ties.

"Don't ask so many fucking questions." Seifer barked, standing up and stretching. He didn't really know why he put up with this annoying kid and his whiny, even more annoying mutt, though he supposed they were better companions than the spectral horrors of his nightmares.

Of course, naked Zell would be preferable to their leering ghost faces burning smoky white afterimages across the backs of his eyelids.

Across the pond, Seth jumped to his feet, Deacon staring balefully at him for a moment before faithfully clambering upright as well. He left his patch of sunlight reluctantly to pad after Seth across dewey grass, looking a little annoyed if Seifer was any judge of canine expressions.

The kid wore his usual patina of timidity and uncertainty over the features just beginning to sharpen toward manhood. The expression pissed him off--frustrated rage skewered his heart on its smoldering blade, and Seifer stood with his jaw clenched like his fists while the two approached him slowly.

Sometimes Seth reminded him of Quistis; it was probably the reason behind his random episodes of irritation toward the harmless boy, and the reason why he just couldn't quite let go. He could easily scare the kid away if he wanted to; he was Seifer Almasy after all, and most people who weren't scared of him hated him--either way, they left him alone.

It wasn't so much the timidness that flash burned images of blonde hair and blue eyes into his brain--he wouldn't really consider Quistis 'timid.' She was decisive, a warrior, logical to a fault-- but a little shy too, hiding the layers of herself beneath her false lacquer of ice, and that was where he drew his similarities.

Or maybe he was just grasping at straws, holding tight to even the most tenuous of connections, because he missed her that much.

And he did. Oh shit, did he miss her. Some nights, when he couldn't sleep, he laid on his musty cot holding his stomach like the muscled band of his arm could hold inside everything threatening to spill out, picturing her face and wishing he would just die if it ended the pain rat-nibbling its way through his gut. When he did sleep, he dreamed of her. Sometimes they were happy memories--the scent of her hair wafting its perfume across his face while he kissed her, the satiny slide of her alabaster skin under his fingers, the smile that was charmingly bashful and devoid of any pretense.

But more often than not, they were nightmares, the kind that shot him upright like a fired bullet in his bed, panting the frightened gasps of a cornered animal, replaying visions of her dying over and over again while he wasn't there to save her.

Some nights, Seifer buried his face in his hands and wept soundlessly while the ghosts of his mother and Raijin danced silent ballets through his head. He was coming apart at the seams again, only this time she wasn't there to patiently stitch him back together.

He'd fallen a long way from his days as the Disciplinarian Committee's leader--from making underage wimps like Chicken Wuss cry to weeping himself to sleep in a ramshackle, abandoned shack that no one else wanted, waiting for morning and his persistent visitors, because he had nothing else to look forward to.

He hated himself.

"Actually, um…Seifer?" Seth asked hesitantly. He hovered in front of the ex-knight with his hands jammed in his pockets, his toe sketching abstract patterns in the dirt again. "I wanted to ask…could you maybe…give me a lesson or something? With that?" He pointed to Hyperion, propped upright beside Seifer's log, jabbed blade first into the dirt and flashing them little beckoning winks every so often when the sunlight caught it just right.

Seifer laughed. "It's too heavy for you." The kid's arms looked like sticks--they'd break under the gun blade's hefty weight.

Deacon, looking bored with the whole affair, laid back down at Seth's feet.

"I can do it." he insisted, looking earnest now.

Seifer contemplated that for a moment, assessing the scrawny teenager, who was nowhere near the size Seifer had been at his age--but then again, most thirteen-year-olds were not soldiers-in-training who spent what time they didn't allot to classroom study and battle training in the weight room. His eyes shifted back to his weapon, his faithful companion--feet upon feet of glistening steel that in the end was his only real friend, as pathetic as that was.

"Fine." He crossed his arms. "Go for it."

"Really?" Seth looked as though he hadn't thought his request would be granted quite so easily.

"Yeah. Pick it up."

There was a brief flash burn of excitement in his eyes, and then understandable hesitation, and then finally--finally--the boy's fingers edged toward Hyperion's scarred handle, creeping around it in a ginger vine growth of twining fingers and shivering palm. He gave it an experimental tug, the heavy weapon not even quivering as the little muscle that did wrap the bones of his arms flexed visibly.

Seifer's growing smile split his mouth open around his teeth. The sun reflected off his grin, and Seth pulled harder.

The ex-knight and once-again traitor watched mockingly, the sunny corona of his hair an overgrown halo that stole the sunlight and reflected it back a thousand times more brightly. He felt the expanding balloon of his mirth swell inside his throat--a shock because it had been a long time since he'd really laughed--and then the bubble snapped, rippling outward into snickers that turned into full-throated laughter when a bright-faced Seth jerked too hard, upsetting his balance and flipping himself over backwards into the pond with a noisy splash.

* * *

Trabia Garden

Training Center

"Resume position, cadet!"

Someone had reached a hand down Quistis Trepe's throat, and ripped her lungs right out of her chest.

She gasped fire, gulped acid, the inferno of her inhalation scratching its ember claws down her throat and into the pit of her stomach, where it bloated to embrace the vulnerable muscle of each internal organ.

_I'm dying, I'm dying--_

It was the only thing she could think of, so she shut her eyes and pictured his face one last time.

He wasn't as she'd last seen him, the trembling murderer studying his bloody hands like they'd just committed a dirty act without his permission--her mind had neatly packaged up Good Seifer, arrogant and angry, beautiful and bold, standing on Matron's beach smiling as she jumped waves, and it was this Seifer she saw now. This Seifer had not killed Rinoa, and his cheeks perfectly fit the curves of her palms; his eyes showed Quistis her own reflection, distorted and convex in the green lenses of his laser focus, and somewhere under the bitter façade she could just glimpse a mischievous boy laughing as he shoved wet sand down another boy's pants.

She remembered the gold spider web lace of his eyelashes…callused hands, rough hands, but gentle when they touched her…the first, painful sucker punch of his penetration, and then the sweaty rhythm of their union…a thousand different faucets of emerald--black-green when he was angry, flecked with splinters of gold when he laughed, entirely new spectrums of light in a rainbow.

Her fingers curled into the fists she'd wanted to punch him with a million times; her lips parted soundlessly around the million invectives she'd longed to hurl at him when he was just a brash, bothersome student in her class.

But her eyes held tight to their memory of his sleeping face inches from her own, blanketed in the ink of absolute night and more boyish than his open gaze would ever suggest. Her eyes remembered the man he'd become before a single thrust of Hyperion had ruined everything.

"Cadet Gainsley!"

_Gainsley…Gainsley…that's my name…_

She struggled upward through a million gauze layers of foggy pain, shredding her way through them like they were the only thing separating her from the blissful black void of unconciousness. Maybe they were--she couldn't really tell which way to go now, which way equaled more pain and which equaled less.

Her throat convulsed, and the cough that exploded from her narrow airway sprayed blood.

Quistis wrenched her eyes open then, staring dumbly at the midnight crimson globule that was her own congealed gore.

Her instructor's face blocked out the artificial lighting of the training center--she studied him through thin layers of almost-blindness, blurry films that had cemented themselves over her eyeballs when she wasn't paying attention. It was a strong face, square-jawed and coated in a bristly down of beard that matched the shaggy chestnut curtain curving into a slapdash triangle at the nape of his neck.

His face was naturally amiable--good-looking in a laid-back way--but now it tightened into stress lines that aged him beyond his twenty-five years, the faint crow's feet beginning to shadow his eyes dimpling into old man creases. "Lena?"

Quistis squinted up at him.

"Hold still--I'm going to get someone down here from the infirmary." His voice sounded underwater-distant, sluggish and indistinct, like it had to punch its way through several layers before it reached her ears.

Her voice was just a croak, and probably not very convincing. "Don't worry--just give me a second."

Someone was still pulling her lungs out with their bare hand, but at least their hand no longer formed a cocoon of liquid fire around the wheezing organs.

She curled around the superheated furnace of her stomach, reneging her earlier thought--it didn't feel like she was dying. Worse, it felt like _he _was dying--it felt like watching him cut arks of destruction through battlefield mayhem with his hands and his feet and his blade, waiting for that one inevitable moment in which he would fall, and then watching in slow-motion horror as his luck finally ran out, as his skill was finally not enough--it felt like waiting for him to come home after watching him fall for an eternity into lavender-painted grass--

Everything would always link back to him. Always--every memory, even the ones that didn't include him, she would somehow find a way to associate with him. Every graze of contact, no matter how alien, would always be his fingers, whispering their tender paths along the curvature of her spine and the swell of her hips.

Quistis felt oblivion reaching its demanding hands toward her. She stretched for it, strained for it, but fell just short, like the stupid, wishful brush strokes of her fingertips as they murmured a trail along her cold bed looking for him even though she knew she was waking up alone.

Dim footsteps perforated her haze, and she vaguely felt herself being lifted onto some kind of stretcher while unfamiliar voices made uncertain promises and spewed unconvincing consolations.

_"Promises are shit." _she remembered him saying, and then, mercifully, everything faded to black at last.

* * *

When Quistis regained conciousness it was her mind that grasped the situation first--her body puddled into useless pasta, flimsy spaghetti muscles that refused to obey every command her frustrated brain sent to them.

Finally, after several disappointing tries, she gave up and concentrated on the senses that did still remain.

The medicinal bouquet of a doctor's office snuck its redolent tendrils up her nostrils, giving her olfactory senses the distinctive urge to flee. Beneath her head and back, she could feel the sticky upholstery layered in its thin sheet of crackling paper that was the utilitarian standard for exam tables everywhere. Somewhere beyond her little square of table and slowly evaporating pain, Quistis could hear the hushed slide of material on material and the lowered mumble of conversation. She could only pick out a few fragmented sentences: "…we won't have any tests back for a little while…don't _think _she has a history of anything like this…I don't…"

She fought a grimace. Her only solo mission in ages, and her body chose this moment to begin disintegrating. Wasn't that just Hyne freaking lovely?

Her throat felt tacky, coating in the remaining slime of the blood clot she'd coughed up earlier. The nuclear burn in her stomach lingered, although much less pronounced now--bearable, like the afterglow of a careless hand set on a hot burner. And her lungs, thankfully, seemed whole still, though bruised and aching.

It took exactly two minutes--she counted each slow, excruciating second off in her head--for Quistis to finally peel her eyes open. The infirmary's light blinded her immediately, and she hastily shut them once more.

"Looks like your patient's awake." Instructor Dawson pointed out, crossing the room in three long strides, his boots clumping heavily against the room's brightly polished floor "Lena? Are you feeling better?"

"Yes." Quistis answered carefully, wincing at the rawness of her throat.

"Does anything hurt?"

_Everything _seemed too broad an answer, so she assessed herself from a clinical perspective and then replied appropriately. "My chest is a little sore. And there's still some tenderness in my stomach, although it's beginning to ease slightly."

"That's good." T. Garden's doctor said, looking nothing like Dr. Kadowaki but reminding Quistis of the motherly woman all the same as he stood there with clipboard and pencil similarly poised. His middled-aged face cracked into a reassuring smile for her, unobtrusive pale blue eyes crinkling slightly around the edges. It was a pleasant face, nondescript and unthreatening, hired to lend comfort to mortally wounded soldiers. "I'm going to need to ask you a couple of questions about your health history."

"Go ahead."

He tapped his eraser in a distracting up and down blur against his board. "You haven't experienced anything like this before, have you? No unexplained abdominal pains, chest pains, violent coughing fits?"

"No, never."

"Any family history of serious illnesses? Heart disease, cancer, gastrointestinal problems, even diabetes?"

She scratched uncomfortably at the IV line in her arm. "My family history is unavailable, unfortunately--I was adopted. I don't remember anything about my biological parents."

"Hmm." He frowned and jotted something down. "Can you describe your symptoms for me right before and during your…collapse?"

She recalled searing pain, the kind that burned like a shooting star crossing the retinas, interspersed with jigsaw pieces of memory taken from different corners of the same puzzle, all of him but disjointed, out of order. "During training drills I started feeling dizzy and then began having intense chest pains all of a sudden--I obviously fell, though I don't really remember doing so. The chest pains continued, and then I began developing stomach pain." She spoke with the matter-of-fact cadence of a teacher lecturing her class, and the scholarly tone of her voice pulled a smile out of the young instructor standing nearby.

Quistis snapped her mouth shut. She was supposed to be an out-of-sorts student who'd just experienced something frightening and uncertain, not Instructor Trepe calmly highlighting bullet points on an overhead projector.

"All right. I took a couple of blood samples while you were out, but we'll have to wait a few days for the results. For the time being though, I suggest you forgo training drills right now and just focus on getting some rest. I'll write you a note to excuse you from classes for the next two days. Come back and see me on Friday--I should have the results by then, and we'll see if we can't figure this out." He gave her another paternal smile. "If you experience any recurrences in pain or anything out of the ordinary, come back right away."

He scribbled out a message in sloppy handwriting, unclipped the page from his board, and handed it to her.

"Thank you," she said automatically.

The doctor nodded to Instructor Dawson by way of farewell, then padded off into his office, where he shut the door with a quiet click. Quistis stared down at the sheet of paper in hands the same color of its bleached bone parchment--hands like the emaciated reaper's claws of the terminally ill. She wondered, with a brief flash of terror, if that title applied to her now.

The young man standing over her bent his lips into an encouraging smile--but it reeked of phoniness, and Quistis wasn't fooled. "I don't want to see you anywhere near my classroom for the next couple of days, ok?"

She saw concern illuminate his eyes like the blue-white radiance of a lightning strike exposing a woodland clearing etched in its nighttime tones of black and purple-gray, and the look on his face reminded her of the way she used to feel when Squall lay injured in Dr. Kadowaki's infirmary, Seifer's wounds ruining his beautiful skin.

Warily, Quistis gave him a cool smile as he tapped her lightly on the shoulder before he left.

She didn't have time for inappropriate crushes; Seifer's had been probably the most inappropriate of all, and look where that had gotten her.

* * *

Quistis spent the next week trying very hard to ignore doctor's and instructor's orders alike, but she was very firmly barred from both the training center and her regular classes as well for several days under strict demands to rest, and so that left her little to do but discover several indiscrepencies that puzzled her.

First, Hayden Garth did not exist--not according to any students she questioned, nor the administrative records that she risked exposure for by breaking into the headmaster's office for a peek at the file cabinets there. It made her tentatively question whether she perhaps should have put more weight into his stories of disappearing students, fanciful myths spun by senior SeeD cadets for the benefit of more naïve first-years. That was all the stories had been at Balamb--just that, stories, wild conspiracy theories wielded as tools to demoralize and frighten impressionable minds. It was a horror most outgrew around the same time they stopped checking shadow-stained closets for monsters, although Quistis thought Zell probably still harbored suspicions against the lunch ladies as possible accessories in such kidnappings--no doubt the women stored the missing children with their cache of Zell's stolen hot dogs.

Then again, Quistis was pretty sure Zell still checked his closet for monsters. In a world where children died on distant battlefields to the metronomic in and out hiss of their own breath, lulled to eternal sleep by the reeking perfume of the intestines coiled like slippery earthworms in their shaking palms, Zell's inability to grow up was refreshing somehow. Quistis had been more grown-up than child by the age of eight, Squall had probably been born stoically adult, and Seifer…Seifer had once been as much a mischievous boy as anyone, the relentless prankster and bully who barely knew the definition of 'consequences.'

Mentally, he was probably at least a hundred by now.

Secondly, there _were _disappearances discreetly lowering Trabia Garden's population--she'd gone through attendance sheets for the past several months as well, and noticed numbers that didn't quite match up, names that vanished without the penciled-in explanations she remembered from back home. _Killed in training accident. Deployed in field. Dishonorably discharged. _

There were no huge gaps--it took a while of meticulous hunting for Quistis to even uncover them, because for every student that mysteriously vanished, there were another two eager young wannabe cadets just waiting to take their place. But Hayden Garth and his ragtag band of potential kidnappers had been right, and it made her wonder just how much he'd known before he too had ceased to exist, not even a bolded typeface on a sheet of paper anymore.

And third, though the academy's students might be wiped clean from all physical records, Seifer Almasy could not be similarly erased from the stored databanks of Quistis' mind. She asked herself a million times a day what he was doing at that moment, and why she should even care--this man had murdered one of her closest friends, had opened a two foot hole in Rinoa's spinal column to the banshee shriek concerto of Squall's horrified screams. She could still see the marble glass of her friend's dead stare, black and depthless like the pit of horror Quistis tumbled down as she watched Seifer looking at the twisted claws of his hands, wearing their wet-paint shine of Rinoa's blood.

The small cell of her room could not contain Quistis' emotions on that particular subject--they stretched on forever, and no 8x12 box of industrial-painted dimensions could ever trap that, no more than the firing synapses of her intelligent brain could ever expect to imprison the pain and longing and faint hope that burned in the nuclear furnace that was her fatally leaking heart, cracked in too many places to ever be properly put back together again.

Her lean dancer's body balancing on one foot, the trembling points of her failing energy siphoned through the talons of her toes where they gripped her thin carpet, Quistis closed her eyes and shoved Seifer's face forcefully from her mind. Bent into the athletic yoga posture that was supposed to bring her inner peace and harmony, perched on one foot while she stretched the other almost to the back of her head with a trembling hand wrapped around the ankle, she just felt confused. The mysteries of Hayden Garth and his missing comrades formed the tornado that circled the lingering after burn of his green eyes, interspersed with random mirror shard images of Rinoa's forehead and its crimson knife slash of drooling gore.

And most puzzling of all: she was actually falling. Fifteen seconds into the arch-backed contortion of _utthita ardha dhanurasana_, Quistis felt the rush of blood to her head and the swirling dizziness that was her eventual demise. Fifteen seconds into a pose she could effortlessly hold for two minutes, she began to teeter, wobbling first to the right and then to the left as she overcorrected and eventually gave up completely, letting her bent leg fall with a noisy thud before she could crumble completely.

She moved into _bakasana_, dropping into a deep squat and opening her knees around bent elbows, the sweaty glass condensation of exertion stringing translucent beads along her forehead in a reflective necklace that changed the room's dirty yellow light into watery gold. Breathing heavily, Quistis leaned forward, taking her weight off her feet and easing it all onto her arms, pointing her toes and hitching her legs higher. She hovered for just one moment of free-flight perfection, and then her own body betrayed her once again, the thin wires of her muscles giving up.

She lay panting on her floor for a moment, frustrated. This had been occurring more and more frequently lately, most noticeably her collapse during drills several days ago, and though a small sliver of poisonous fear lodged in her heart, mostly she was just ticked. It was ridiculous that Quistis Trepe, perfectionist who pushed herself much harder than she would ever drive any of her students, should find her own body failing in this way. The trembling weakness of her muscles was an exasperating malfunction of the limberly trained tendons that comprised her warrior's body. She felt like Seifer must have during his brief moments of clarity when he looked into the sweat sheen of the sorceress' face, into the feverish glow of power-hungry madness, and wondered why the hell the hand he clenched around her neck in an executioner's noose would not squeeze.

Quistis was no longer in control of her own body. It was not the sensation of another inhabitant, not the detached, liquid-limbed possession of Rinoa--this was pure mechanical failure, when the brain commands the breath to flow more easily and it jags into the ragged wheeze of a dying animal instead.

Sighing, she abandoned her exercise regime and rolled to her knees, disappointed.

Her tests, she'd learned two days ago, had returned 'inconclusive.' Medical jargon for 'Sorry, I haven't got a clue what's wrong with you.'

She missed the chaotic disarray of Zell's hair above his stupidly grinning face, and the familial warmth of Irvine's lazily attractive grin. She missed the sunrise flash that was the brilliance of Rinoa's smile; but weak though Quistis was, she missed the wild feline flash burn intensity of his green eyes most of all.

That was what was really wrong with her.

* * *

He always saw her on the beach. It was not the gore-soaked ruby luster of battlefield sands, not the empty ocean shore in front of the old orphanage, where the staring eyes of vacant windows reflected back the lonely waves painting their abstract patterns of foam into the ground where happy children had once played.

This beach where he saw her was the one he constructed in his mind--these sands were never inked into twisted monster shapes by treacherous shadows, each grain a glowing flaxen bead that joined millions of others to form one long golden band snaking the length of his perfect turquoise sea. Above, the convex slashes of faraway birds cut black grooves into sapphire material--its only flaws except the faultless sphere of the beach's sun, flash grenade bright in its background of blue satin.

He'd never really had a physical sanctuary in life. It was only fair that he could spin one into existence inside his own mind, a place so riddled through with the smoking edges of the holes Matron had ripped into his psyche that this one splash of light inside all the dark was a gift from Hyne.

Here, she didn't hate him. He didn't care if Chicken Wuss himself put in an appearance, so long as her fingers stayed wrapped around his own, the pale joints like warm moonlight across the crosshatched scar tissue of his palm.

Today, Seifer's body lay stiff and aching in its cocoon of moth-eaten blankets, the tentative fists of an incoming storm knocking against his frail home while his mind watched Quistis' hair blowing in a salt-scented breeze.

He smiled and stretched his face up into the warmth.

_I used to think I was more comfortable in battle, but that was never really true. Stabbing Hyperion through the inch thick slab of someone's abdominal wall, feeling the vibrating energy of my weapon slice its way across the ridges of a whip lashing spinal cord--that was fucking living. _

_It was fucking living until that thing wearing my mother's face made me into her puppet--and then I had to wonder if I'd really just been someone's fucking marionette the entire time. It's like each spurt of blood is their paint, and I'm the one holding the fucking brush--but I can feel their icy fucking hand around mine, and I'm not the artist of the death scene at all, just the tool._

_Standing here with her in my little make-believe world, it's like…I don't need some great purpose behind everything I do. There's no ambition sitting on my shoulders like a thousand pound cruise ship, carving shadow talons into my neck that feel like the icy raptor claws of some fucking demon ghost. I just feel her hand, and even though it's not real, it's perfect enough until I open my eyes and reality comes crashing back down. _

_This is the only way I can deal with how much I miss her. If I can't come here for just a little while, she doesn't exist anymore--I can't see any part of her except the wide-eyed terror of her face looking at me like I'm infested with a million different fatal diseases all genetically tailored specifically to kill her. It's not fucking fair that I have to lose everything in my life that means something. _

_Those fucking birds call out in the meaningless tenor of their own strident language, and I can see her smiling up at me out of the corner of my eye. This part hurts the most, even though I would never make her stop--because this is just so real, you know? I can retain that part of my mind that tells me she's not really smiling at me because she's hundreds of miles away and hates my fucking guts, and that's what pokes these little acid swords into my stomach, like the needle-pointed fish teeth of yesterday's catch latching their barbed slivers under my fingernail. _

_I'm not wearing shoes in this place; the sand burns my feet, like Rinoa's gore seared my hands as she slithered down the accusing finger length of Hyperion. That noise is the worst soundtrack in the world--a bloody-meat squelch, moist and sucking like the first chop of a butcher's cleaver. I hear it every night. _

_I focus on the graceful swan's curve of her neck--it's not her eyes, which would never show me their revulsion, not in this place, but I still have a hard time meeting her gaze. _

_She's the only person whose hatred ever hurt, but I don't tell her that. She'll feel guilty, and that will destroy her smile. I used to hate watching it crack from her face, fracturing into a million pieces--usually because my clumsy, fucking incompetence with words smashed it right off her lips. _

_She is so fucking beautiful. And I don't just mean the flawless stretch of her skin, or her endless eyes, or those forever legs. Sometimes, in more honest moments, I realize Quistis is everything I was probably supposed to be: honest, virtuous, unbendably moral, even if she's not perfect. I just share her loyalty and her stubbornness, and in the end those two character traits pretty well fucked me over. I can't even really admit to myself how much I wish she would have accepted me in the end, flaws in all, like she promised. I know promises are shit--I've made that point more than once, but still, losing her is this fucking constant burning in my stomach, like I swallowed the goddamn sun._

Seifer closed the shutters on his chattering stream of flowing consciousness, flicking the switch inside his mind that silenced his inner monologue. It was a painfully honest conversation he had with himself sometimes, too serious for the dream-spun clouds and crashing waves blending with the perfect seraph's beauty of his beach.

But sometimes it seemed the only way to keep himself from flying apart. Maybe he'd just suffered too many losses within the short time span of just a couple of months, but lately he felt so unbearably _old _that peeling himself from the sweat-soaked cotton of his mattress seemed like too much of an effort. He spent hours, sometimes days--with Seth intervening every so often to shyly try and coax a few gun blade lessons from him--lying in his bed watching the shattered pieces of his life coalesce in front of his eyes only to crash-land back into the ruined shards of his existence, a slow-motion rewind of blonde hair and parade enthusiasts and Leonheart's slumped shoulders shading the horizon of a war-torn shore.

The teenager and his furry mutt had come calling once already today; he'd rebuked them with a snarled warning to get out, and the shy boy had obediently fled, although not before commanding Deacon to stay, apparently. He supposed the dog that wandered absently into his room every so often to lie facing Seifer with his head on his paws was meant to comfort him--and maybe the stupid thing did, sometimes, just a little. He hated dogs, animals being a general bane to his existence, but there was something so stupid and sometimes downright pathetic about them that it was hard not to feel slight twinges of sympathy sometimes. Here at least was one creature he could feel superior to, even while at his worst; what did it do other than sleep, shit, eat, and breathe?

Then again, could he say he did much else these days? At least the dog probably wasn't wasting his time pining after someone who used to understand him but now hated him just as much as the general public.

What a worthless piece of crap the great Seifer Almasy had become.

He sat upright with a groan, his bones creaking as he swung both bare feet down to graze the cold floor, and Deacon's head came up, the tail wagging tentatively. He glared at the animal; maybe if he could blame his useless apathy on something else, he wouldn't feel quite so disgusted with himself.

Deacon accompanied him enthusiastically out to the sagging front porch where he wedged his feet behind flaccid leather tongues into the weathered chill of his boots; Seifer smelled snow as he stood surveying his weedy garden and the woods between his home and Seth's, and tucked his naked hands beneath his armpits. The little shack was somewhere in the Trabian Wilderness, and while they'd had a stretch lasting a few weeks of warm, bearable weather, that was subject to change on a dime, and anything more tepid than snow flurries was rare for most of the year. He'd have to patch up the numerous holes pock marking his little hovel, or die of hypothermia. That wasn't exactly his blaze of glory, although neither was starving slowly to death on a musty old cot because he was PMSing like some fucking girl.

The ground crunched like brittle glass beneath his feet, the first glazed frost of winter's fury splintering under Seifer's boots. He walked rapidly, fighting his way through undergrowth into the clearing that held Raijin's and his mother's headstones and then beyond, toward the small cottage where Seth and his older sister lived, haphazardly cheerful beneath its coat of slapdash paint. The boy's sister would be away at school right now, like always; sometimes Seifer wondered if there really was a sister, or if this fresh-faced orphan was eking out his existence the best way he knew how, with a little help from some sympathetic old lady who visited every so often to bring him food and company. Maybe that was why he'd latched onto Seifer so quickly, not exactly a stellar example of familial love and acceptance, but the closest thing the teen would ever come to.

It reminded Seifer of his own childhood and his fierce attachment to the orphanage gang even though they annoyed him most of the time--he had nothing else, no other sense of belonging, not when his real family didn't want him anymore. What else was a child supposed to love when all they had was the memory of their father's damaging fists and their mother's china-doll blank face, robotic except when contorted into the ugly, ornate theater's mask of a tragedy?

And when they had left him too--the bossy blue-eyed blonde, the loud-mouthed crybaby, the schmuck with his cowboy hat, slow drawl and irritating little girlfriend, and his stoic nemesis whom he could never quite live up to--he'd learned to love himself.

He banged a fist heavily on the door, rattling its hinges. The door opened to the sunshine glow of Seth's beaming face; Deacon shoved his way rudely past Seifer, knocking him sideways with a curse and flattening Seth up against the frame.

"Seifer!"

Had anyone ever sounded that happy to see him before? Something warm closed its furnace fist around his heart; he crossed his arms and scowled to vanquish any trace of amiability that flashed in his eyes. Old defense mechanisms died hard.

"You want to have lunch with us?"

"Us?"

"Yeah; my sister's back today. We're just having soup and sandwiches, but--"

Soup and sandwiches was far better than anything he had available to him back home--blank-socketed, half-rotting fish and a few dust balls, namely. But if Seth's sister was more well-traveled than the kid, she might recognize him--his traitor's brand had traveled much farther than any training center heroics ever had.

"Nah." he said. "I just came to return the stupid mutt."

He turned to leave, the delicate click of feminine heels tapping out a heartbeat rhythm across the floor toward him before his head swiveled completely away. Another face joined Seth's in the door frame, rose-cheeked contours beneath strawberry blonde hair that suddenly struck him as very familiar.

Seifer spun back around, his palm whipping out to stop the door as her mouth gaped in the slack fish jaws of recognition. She pushed for a few seconds, and he flexed the iron band muscles in his arms just slightly, easily holding her back.

He knew this woman. The bitch had stabbed him several times with a very large needle in the infirmary of Garden, and--for some Hyne unknown reason--begun dating Zell several months ago.

"What the fuck?" Seifer blurted out.

Seth's sister was Bria Jaycen.


	25. Chapter 24

**Chapter Twenty Four**

Becknol Forest

Trabian Wilderness

Something dark and malevolent reached its fingers into the crevices of his mind and ripped hard. It was not a fully-formed thought, not some profound, life-altering realization--just a cold, cold worm of _something _squirming inside his gut as he glared into the wide-eyed shock of her face.

He shoved the door completely open, tearing it free of her hands.

Bria Jaycen had not struck him as a timid person--particularly not while she savaged him with medical devices without batting an eye despite his most dire threats--but she backed away from him now; he was surprisingly…_immense_, filling the doorway like some malicious specter, like some hell-sent demon with his flashing ember eyes and the glisten of his bared teeth.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he snapped.

He could see Seth in the background, looking scared now, clutching the loose scruff of Deacon's neck like the insulated roll of flesh could somehow rescue him from the threat in his friend's coiled-animal stance. He was the child hiding from shadow monsters by closing his eyes, convinced that if he could not see them, they couldn't see him.

"This is your sister?" Seifer pushed on when Bria said nothing, aiming this snarled question at Seth, who gripped his dog more tightly and looked terrified. Deacon appeared confused, as though he was aware someone here was the enemy, but he was not quite sure just who fit that description. "Your sister, who's away at fucking university during the week, huh? Chicken Wuss know you abandoned your kid brother to be a medical assistant a hundred miles away in Balamb?"

Bria's eyes spat sudden fire. Seifer shouldered the door shut behind him, the boom of it rocketing back into its frame rattling the entire house. "Chicken Wuss?" she said tightly, the faint crinkled line of confusion marring her brow.

"Dincht. The pointy-haired asshole you're dating." Seifer thundered, irrationally angry now as the room around him sank through layers of red-tinged fury, stratums of varying crimson shades that laid their bloody sheets across his eyes like a soldier's gore-soaked bandages. Some of it was for the kid, abandoned like he had been, raising himself at the age of thirteen in a harsh, empty forest with just a dog for companionship. But subtle tributaries of his anger were mysteries, branching away from the main kiln of the fireball that had eaten his chest--this discovery was significant somehow, part of his mind told him.

"Seth, go to your room." Bria ordered quietly, standing between Seifer's radiating hostility and her brother.

He hesitated a moment, the 'o' of his lips a horrible pucker of grief, like he somehow knew Seifer was not really the adoptive brother he wanted to see him as, but the bad guy.

Surprisingly, it hurt like the hacking blade of her eyes, cutting out pieces of his heart and feeding them back to him while he stared blankly down at the blood on his hands.

Then the boy left like Quistis, and Seifer Almasy found himself once more without friends.

"Aren't you supposed to be dead?" Bria asked.

"I came back." he snapped. "Remember the guy who went with Squall to Deling City to get Laguna back? You know, the one you about fucking stabbed to death afterward? That was me. Faked execution, false identity, blah, blah, blah. Aren't you in the middle of a goddamn war right now or something?"

"I can't come back to visit my brother?"

"You didn't really seem to give a shit all those months you were running around Garden making fucking goo-goo eyes at Chicken Wuss. How long did you leave him here?"

"Don't criticize me, asshole." she spat. "I had duties to take care of. Seth's good at taking care of himself."

"He's fucking _thirteen_."

"I don't really think you're the qualifying expert on how to raise someone, so you can just shut your mouth." She sank tensely into a chair she yanked out from the dining room table, and he watched her hands tremble their way into place against its wooden seat back. He thought that quiver might not all be self-righteous anger anymore, because something had shifted in her eyes, and he saw what he'd seen in so many gazes he'd lost count of them now: fear.

"What are you doing back here now?" he demanded, crossing his arms.

"I come back to check on him every so often."

"I never saw you leave Garden for a while. It takes a couple of days just to get up here." Seifer pointed out through clenched teeth.

"You weren't exactly a regular at Garden for the first couple of months I was there, if you remember. Running off with Quistis Trepe, you know, getting accused of the murders that got you 'executed.' Remember any of that?"

Seifer winced at the mention of Quistis; talk about rubbing lemon juice into a paper cut. Or battery acid. "No, actually--I forgot all about that, but thanks for bringing it back up." He wanted to smack the bitch so badly it was an almost physical ache trembling through his clenched palms. "You didn't leave while I was gone. There's this little thing about Garden--it was a _military institution_. You didn't just get to pack up and take off because your little brother had no mommy or daddy. I used to get around security at night and take off--but not for days. That's called AWOL, and they sort of, you know, fucking frown on it. Seth told me his sister went to university during the week and checked up on him when she came back--I'm just curious how many 'weeks' he had to wait for you to come back."

Bria ignored that. "What are you doing here anyway?"

Seifer shrugged. "I got the impression I wasn't really welcome anywhere else anymore."

Bria's eyes narrowed. "Did you kill Rinoa?"

"No--that one was all on fucking Santa Clause." Seifer snapped. "Why the hell do you think I'm freezing my balls off up here? People sort of stop liking you when you stick your gun blade through their friend's spine."

"I was under the impression no one liked you in the first place."

_Someone did. Once upon a fucking time. _Seifer thought bitterly. "You didn't answer any of my questions. Here, I'll make it easier for you: what were you doing at Garden, if you had a family back here you were supposed to take care of?"

"Interning with Dr. Kadowaki." Bria replied coolly, her fingers knotting whitely together on the table's grimy surface, her slender knuckles carving little circular impressions into accumulated grime.

"Stop lying, bitch." he replied bluntly. "Why didn't you go to Trabia Garden? That's a lot closer."

She hesitated for a second. "Don't talk to me like that. And I did, at first. I transferred over to Balamb."

"Why?"

"None of your business."

Some distant, dusty light bulb snapped to life inside his head. "You know what's interesting? Didn't you transfer over about the same time someone tried to kill Quistis? You know, about the same time people started suspecting there might be a spy in Garden?"

"Are you accusing me of something?" Her hands gripped the table like the talons of a bird of prey, gripping for dear life to the only meal they would find in a desolate land for a long, long time. Full lips compressed until even her youthful face showed the beginning trademarks of age around her mouth, little fracture lines of stress that told him the nagging voice in the back of his head persuading him to make some connection was on the right track.

Seifer's hand blurred. He didn't even remember moving it, but suddenly his fingers wrapped themselves around the young woman's throat, digging into the healthy pink of her skin like the gnarled rigor mortis claws of a reaper bearing death, his grip leaving bands of corpse-white on her neck. "Did you think you were fucking smart, dating Zell, pretending like you were one of her fucking friends--"

"I didn't send anyone to kill her!" Bria rasped out around his steel grasp.

"Then who did?" Seifer hissed, bringing his face inches from hers, the primitive section of his brain watching the bulge of her frantic eyes with glee, the animalistic piece of him that Ultimecea had exploited writhing in pleasure with each panicked nail stroke she dragged down his unyielding wrist. He could squeeze the life right out of this bitch's eyes--he could dim that panicked glow to just the fading luster of fleeing awareness until at last it winked out, like the dissipating sunset of the world's final day.

And Hyne, did he want to. He did not yet know how all the puzzle pieces fit together, but he knew this crossover from his old life into his new exile was not some happy coincidence--the inconsistencies of this woman he'd never paid much attention to were now beginning to bother him, and he wondered now why he hadn't noticed anything off about her. He'd been Quistis' protector, her knight because Squall didn't want the job--and yet somehow he had completely missed this.

But his hands refused the command for the final constriction that would kill her. His fingers tightened fractionally--and then loosened enough to let her talk, to let her breathe, because somewhere in the back of his head, he heard Quistis telling him he was not the bad guy everyone thought he was. He saw her disapproving stare pasted on over the wild animal glaze of Bria's eyes--and sighed, let go, and crossed his arms over his chest.

She knocked over two chairs in her haste to back away from him, gingerly feeling the red candy stripe marks of his violent fingers.

"Talk." Seifer barked.

Bria swung around toward the small lightless kitchen, lunging for the molten-metal glint reflecting her face and the strawberry fire ark of her hair back to her.

Seifer sprang and grabbed her wrist, his fingers denting her pulse point; she screamed as he flung her back into the table, the crash of her body against aging wood flipping it over and scattering chairs.

She saw him pick up the knife through half-shut eyes, his face an empty doll's mask of emotionless threat. It was the dead-eyed stare of a serial killer, and she scrabbled automatically at the floor with torn nails, trying to drag herself away. She could feel the prey gallop of her heartbeat banging out its panicked cadence in the side of her neck, the same heartbeat hammering her ribs as well; it echoed like the final concussive blasts of a weapon of mass destruction.

His hand closed around her ankle, and now her heart slammed like a careening roller coaster car into her mouth--she felt the long, torturous slide of it back down into her leaden stomach as he flipped her onto her back, and the acid sting of tears cut brutal slashes into the roots of her lashes. She was not a goddamn soldier, and this man scared the shit out of her.

Her foot bashed the point of his chin; she saw his head jerk back, the blonde hair take flight, and then she was crawling as fast as she could squirm her way through upended chairs and table legs, screaming for Seth to get out of the house.

Seifer threw one of the chairs out of her way, and seized her with one final, unavoidable animal snare snap of the fingers, vising shut around the collar of her shirt.

"Get off me! _Get off me_!" Bria shrieked, grazing one of his cheeks with her fist.

He deposited her roughly on the kitchen countertop, glaring as he probed the red notch where she'd split his jaw line, and his eyes were not dead now--they were the blazing jewels of hell's most luxurious décor, and she wondered how she could have ever pictured them as the blank canvases she'd seen just a moment ago.

"Knock it the fuck off. I'm not going to kill you. But if you fucking kick me like that again, I'll cut your face into little pieces." He gripped the knife and crossed his arms pointedly, the blade reaching the length of his forearm like some glinting automaton's limb peeking through the greasy layers of his trench coat. "What the hell's going on? What did you have to do with the assholes who were trying to kill Quistis?"

"Nothing." she insisted, the fists of her hands sliding tensely onto her kneecaps.

"Really? Hey, you never really liked the tip of your nose, right? Fucker curls up kinda' weird, anyway. Chicken Wuss likes the pig noses, huh?" He laid that cold, cold knife edge of moonlit steel across the flaring caverns of her nostrils, and she felt the top epidermis of her skin separate as he leaned his weight into it.

Bria jerked her head back, but his other hand was already there, softly guiding, rough like a passionate lover's grip on the new-penny shine of her hair. "Stop it, Seifer! Stop it. Seth…"

Something flashed in his eyes--the murderer holding his newborn child in his arms for the first time, a brisk ripple-fan of wounded emotion that made her think maybe he'd never intended to slice any further than just the stinging paper cut nick she bled through now.

"Get that thing the hell away from me and I'll explain what I know about the situation."

He pulled his weapon back, but did not set it aside.

"I'm here because Quistis is--I'm supposed to keep an eye on her."

Seifer's heart thudded into the empty well hole of his stomach. "She's here? For me?" He was pathetic, and it sickened him, but even if she'd come north to this frozen wasteland to kill him, at least he'd get to see her. And whatever she wanted to do to him, he probably deserved.

"She doesn't even know you're here. She's at Trabia Garden."

"What's she doing there?" Seifer demanded.

"Spying." Bria said, wiping the blood from beneath her nose. "Trying to figure out how it ties into the assassination attempts and Ultimecea's interest in her."

Seifer flashed back to fair corkscrews and pewter eyes, twitching in blind panic beneath dark lashes as he held his gun blade to the kid's white throat. "And you're spying on her, for Galbadia."

"I'm not working for Galbadia."

"Then who the fuck are you working for?" he snapped. "It's like pulling fucking teeth with you."

Bria crossed her arms. "I'm working for Garden."

"Trabia Garden?"

She hesitated, like she was considering just how much she could get away with, how many yards of wool she could pull down over his eyes before he sensed something amiss. His knife and the narrow slits he screwed his gaze down into told her not much, and so she studied the floor beneath the jittery back and forth ark of her feet, picturing Zell's face in the reflective gloss of rubbed-clean tiles where she'd dragged her flailing body--and told the truth, for the first time in months.

"I don't work for Garden. The Sorceresses didn't just have their Knights as protectors."

The band of Seifer's stomach snapped tight around his spine, coiling like the wary snake that is threatened by circling predators. He felts its acids seep through into the bone shipmast of his vertebrae, eating through the solid core of his back until he could feel himself begin to slump like the puppet he'd always been, propped up by strings no longer and sagging helplessly toward a forever fall into oblivion. "You're telling me you're with that _bitch_?"

She could imagine making the same confession to Zell, the child's grin slouching into hurt betrayal, the puppy-dog furrow of his brow like a million punches to the gut--and one last fatal one to the heart, the fist penetrating the defensive pen of her ribs and ripping the organ out in one soggy red whirlpool of blood and clumped tissue. "Ultimecea's been around for almost a century, Seifer. People have 'killed' her hundreds of times, just like SeeD tried to--you never really destroy her, just the body she's using at the time. She's weakened, but as soon as someone else comes along, she's got a new vessel and starts feeding off them until that one dies of old age or is killed too, and then she moves on again."

He leaned back heavily against the table, its edge jutting sharply into the backs of his knees.

"A few…I guess you could call them handmaidens or something…are selected by the sorceress to protect her in the event that the Knight fails. They're replaced as often as they need to be, just like her different bodies--I'm the most recent one. I enrolled at Garden because she was already inside Rinoa, but it would be a while before she could really do anything, so I had to make sure Rinoa stayed safe while Ultimecea was still vulnerable. And I was supposed to keep an eye on Quistis. When she ran off with you, I stayed behind because protecting Ultimecea's new body was the priority. And other arrangements were made, obviously--I heard there were a couple more attempts on her life while you were gone."

The white circles of Seifer's knuckles glowed with the lunar illumination of half-moons in an ominously still sky. He could feel the same hand that had ripped Bria's heart out of her chest squeezing his lungs together, grinding them to a moist pulp between the dagger edges of his ribs. "Why is she interested in Quistis?"

"Quistis is the last descendent in a line of sorceress.'"

His mouth dropped like the wide-open gape of Zell devouring two hot dogs simultaneously. "You're _shitting _me."

"No. She's competition, even if the bloodline is pretty diluted by now. You were a part of Ultimecea--you know how ruthless she is. Any threat, no matter how small it might be--" She didn't need to finish her sentence--it was already completed in Seifer's eyes, in the three million half-ghost figurines of Quistis and Ultimecea, acting out their own little theatrics of tragedy and violence in the trillion different scenarios of her death. His face matched the color of his knuckles now, and for a moment Bria thought he was about to vomit all over the floor.

"I didn't kill her."

He hadn't asked her a question; it was a horrified statement, made more to himself than to her, but she replied anyway. "No." Bria said quietly. "You just killed Rinoa. Ultimecea's still alive, and I think…" Her heart drowned slowly in the burning pile that was the bottom of her guilt-eaten stomach. The molten lava of her heartache sizzled through the lining of her gut, and splashed its corrosive fingers over the rest of her innards.

She was a burning woman now, swallowed alive by her own personal demons just like him.

"I think Quistis is dying."

The winched-tight clench of Seifer's jaw told Bria he was going to kill her.

But it wasn't homicide in his gaze--just grief like she'd rarely seen before, the kind you saw in the eyes of soldiers cradling their best friend's severed head in their hands on the battlefield, and it made her wonder just how tormented this swaggering asshole really was.

"Rinoa was cremated." Bria continued thickly, swallowing hard. "While she was…burning, Ultimecea's soul escaped and she--she touched Quistis. And now Quistis is sick; losing strength, gradually getting weaker, coughing up blood sometimes--it's like she's just sort of slowly wasting away. I think Ultimecea is feeding off her."

Seifer felt his stomach roll, one violent upheaval like the earthquake convulsion of a ship on stormy seas. He felt sweat stipple itself in febrile little dots along the line of his hair, and very distantly he felt his hand loosen, and the knife slide in one cold stripe of slick metal--_slick like her tongue in his mouth and her words in his eager ears--_down his arm and onto the floor between them. "Is she…_inside _Quistis?" _I can't kill her. I can't kill her even if it means I'm saving the whole fucking world--_

"No. I've seen sorceress possession before, and this wasn't it. But I think she's somehow managing to siphon Quistis' life force away--it'll make her more powerful than using someone normal like Rinoa, who didn't have any connection to the sorceresses until Adel possessed her. Quistis is family--distant, but still."

The bow tie knot of Seifer's guts lurched more violently. "How do I stop her from killing Quistis?"

"I don't know--"

"You fucking _bitch_--she doesn't deserve this!" Seifer screamed, slamming his fist through a cabinet, fragile wood splintering under his fist. Muffled by distance, he heard Deacon's warning bark.

Seifer was yelling again, and each knife syllable of rage slammed its stiletto blade home into Seth's aching ear drums.

He hugged his knees to his chest and squeezed his eyes shut while Deacon burrowed against him--he was five again, gap-toothed and smiling when the screaming began, and the same shattering that floated out on its musician's notes of calamity and brutality that drifted from the window over his head now.

His kitchen table and blanket fortress showed him their shadows, twisted and monstrous across the hanging sheets of his 'walls' where they writhed in a grotesque dance that scared him. He could hear Bria screaming--Daddy was touching her funny again--and that scared him more than their shadow monsters where they struggled out a black and white cinema in front of his wide eyes.

Mommy was crying again--not silent tears like the hot ones dragging their cinder rakes down his cheeks--loud sobs intermingled with her garbled screaming, almost as frightening as Daddy's.

The kitchen floor felt cold beneath his pants, like the frost that flash-burned the memory of hiding in his fort and crying into the contours of his brain. He'd hugged one of his blankets to him like he tucked his loyal pet against the flimsy cotton of his shirt--the lines of past and present blurred, and suddenly Seifer was Daddy now, and he finally couldn't take it anymore.

"_Stop it! Stop it, please!_" he screamed, wrenching the door open. "Seifer, don't hurt her!"

The kid was a fucking mess--scrunch-faced and red, the palms of his hands curled into the wrecking ball fists that looked like they might withstand knocking over a doll house, but certainly not taking on one-hundred-eighty pounds of pissed off mercenary. He looked frail in the narrow doorframe, stretched too-thin over the rapidly growing framework of his body--but his eyes said he would die to protect family, and that was the look that unraveled Seifer's killing stance and made him stop.

Maybe he was going fucking soft. What did he say to the kid? "'I'm going to kill your sister because she's a traitor like I used to be and she's helping some bitch kill the woman I love'"? What did he say to the kid who'd started to feel like his little brother--the kid who's sister he had once more by the throat, because she wouldn't tell him how to save Quistis?

He said nothing. He let go, turned his back on Seth, and stared Bria dead in the eye.

"Seifer, I don't want to do this anymore." she said miserably, looking as defeated as he must have when Ultimecea's hold on him had finally snapped completely, and he was left holding nothing but his traitor's brand and the enmity of an entire world. "I tried to disobey her as much as I could, even when she hurt me."

"Boo fucking hoo." he snapped, thinking faintly of his hypocrisy--hadn't he once been where she now found herself, after all? But no one had given him sympathy for being weak, and she wouldn't get any either--particularly when it endangered Quistis.

"I don't want her to kill Quistis either, but I don't know how to stop it. You'd have to kill her, actually kill her this time, before she picks another body."

"And how the hell do I do that?"

"I don't know. Did she ever tell you the key to destroying her when you were under her control?" Bria shot back caustically.

She had a point, even if he still wanted to snap her neck.

"Get Quistis here." he demanded, kicking a chair out of his way.

"What?"

"Just get her here. Kidnap her if you fucking have to, I don't care. I need to see her."

He needed to see her like he needed a fucking decent meal for once--he hoped it didn't show on his face, because even if Bria meant nothing to him and he'd completely destroyed himself in the eyes of Seth, he was still the man who prided himself on poker faces and nonchalance when it came to women. Even if there was nothing nonchalant about the way his feelings for Quistis still cremated his chest with their shockwave tongues of flame and astringent poison.

* * *

She assumed she'd passed out in training again--this was the same loose-limbed detachment as before, the same echoed throbbing of remembered pain and the faint afterburn of vomit laying its acid sheet across her throat. She unpeeled her eyelids like glued fingers painstakingly separating themselves and blinked her surroundings slowly into focus.

But this was not the medicinal stench of powdered latex and freshly sterilized instruments, nor the slow-leak drip of an IV line replenishing her body with necessary fluid--this was stripped-bare wood, rotten with age and poor care-taking, windows decorated in the sinuous lace of spider webs and dust balls. This was the scent of mildew, dried sweat and the pine tang of evergreens carrying their mantles of fine white, the spearhead lance of gray winter light through dirty glass--and the bleached-white face of Seifer Almasy, standing three feet in front of her on a sagging porch wearing his trench coat and his scar and the shadow canyons of despair carved beneath his eyes.

She had not lost consciousness, as she'd originally assumed--the world had just stopped spinning on its axis for a moment, and now that it had begun again, she felt vaguely like vomiting.

Quistis' heart stopped.

It took three weeks to convince himself that Bria was not going to bring Quistis to him--and why should she? She didn't owe him anything, and Hyne knew she didn't have any reason to do him a favor.

And then he'd walked outside to find her standing beside his scruffy patch of garden, ankle-deep in snow, her face looking like the distortion of his own features felt--like looking at him was killing her, like he'd taken his gun blade and shoved it right the fuck through her spinal column, just like he'd done to her friend.

Part of him wanted her to march right up to him and kill him; he wanted to feel the final claw-groove of her whip's fatal teeth sawing through his neck tendons, painting his throat in the arterial brushstrokes of his own death, because when his soul--if any of it still remained--breathed its relieved sigh of _finally _and slithered free of his corpse, he could stop seeing every sin he'd ever committed shuffling past in the jeweled slideshow that was her gaze.

He didn't need Bria's dire diagnosis to realize she was sick. He could see it in the half moon arks of bruise under her eyes, and the sallow blandness the luminosity of her skin had gradually faded to.

It made him want to save her. It made him want to be that goddamn knight in shining armor a revered Squall had always been to her on his untouchable pedestal--but he was still that fucking idiot at the bottom, trying to saw off the platform's marble base with just a pocket knife.

It made him want to slam himself down on both knees and start begging her forgiveness, but his knees were still titanium will, and even when a small piece of him pleaded for them to fold, the rigid bands of muscle along his legs locked themselves tight, and that small piece of him lost the fight.

Just what the hell was he supposed to say? 'Hey, what's up? Look, sorry about murdering your friend right in front of you and all. I didn't want to, shit just happens. I've got this really nice house now; wanna' fuck in it?'

He shoved his hands in his pockets instead, wondering who would make the first step toward closing the small space that stretched like forever between them.

If she kept looking at him like that, it would have to be Seifer, and that small piece of him just might win in the end after all.

He fucking hated women. Men could never pull off the full-lipped vulnerability and blinking doe eyed veneer women wrapped so easily around themselves--even propped rigidly upright by her pride-stiffened spine, Quistis' face tore at his heartstrings. Beneath the arctic glaze of her eyes, he could see the scars he'd left behind the second the panicked stuttering of his brain crammed the signal to kill Rinoa through to his hands, and the next moment he was holding a handful of blood and the splintered pieces of what this woman used to feel for him.

He ripped his tongue free, and it felt like prying it off a super-glued table. He felt each parting tear the adhesive of his silence gouged from that warm muscle, and when he could finally hear himself speaking through the ocean roar filling his ears, it wasn't what he'd expected to say.

"I wanted to save her."

He let that truth leak into his eyes, pulling it up like slippery intestines from the clenched fist of his stomach.

Rinoa had understood what he was doing, even if he himself hadn't been quite sure--the final eye blink of those brown eyes was her own, and she'd filled them with gratitude in the last second before her last breath wheezed out on a sunset cloud of blood.

But Quistis hadn't seen that, and he didn't expect her to understand. She'd never been under that bitch's control.

Sometimes death was just the only fucking way.

Sometimes he still wondered if it was supposed to be that way for him, and he was just too stubborn to give up.

The moisture that turned her eyes shiny was either the sinus-burn of extreme cold, or tears. He wasn't sure, and not knowing ripped a new hole in his chest.

The damn thing must be close to looking like Swiss cheese by now.

"I believe you." There was a lurking _but _in her statement that probably broke his heart, but he wasn't quite sure--something numb had vised itself around his porous chest, and nothing could get through that frostbitten layer into his vital organs below.

Which was probably a good thing, because he didn't want to destroy the last of his dignity by falling face forward into the snow like his knees suddenly wanted to--sure the fuckers could bend _now_--and sobbing like the fucking girl he'd turned into while he rotted away his remaining time in the piece of shit shack behind him.

At least he could stop being such an asshole and invite her in out of some of the cold--his 'house' was patched now--poorly, but at least he'd made the effort--and though it didn't block everything it was at least better than the shivers of breeze out here that curled their ghost fingers up her spine, shaping her small body around them in a liquid rippling that threatened to snap her right in half. He'd never been very good at _not _being an asshole, but trying new things never hurt anyone. Unless it involved falling for a blue-eyed blonde instructor who'd always been too good for you, or following that outstretched hand dripping its coils of black and violet lace down a long slow slide into hell.

Fuck. He'd never been very good at trying new things, either.

* * *

She could faintly remember sitting in Bria's unwarmed kitchen, listening with growing horror to the truths she'd had little luck at unwinding in Trabia Garden, whirlwind fragments of new knowledge about spies and hidden bloodlines.

Zell's girlfriend was, to put it bluntly, the way Seifer would, the sorceress' bitch, and she, Quistis Trepe, orphan mercenary trying to forget that she loved the man who'd killed a good friend, was the last in an almost-extinct line of sorceresses just like the one who'd possessed Rinoa and ultimately led to her death.

Her recent weakness was probably because of Ultimecea's last contact with her during Rinoa's cremation, the result of her life force being slowly siphoned away through the venom suckers of the sorceress' unseen touch.

In other words, she was slowly dying, like a terminal cancer patient condemned to a final six months.

And now here she was, still recovering from the blunt force of these full body blows, sitting across from Seifer trying to ignore the bullet hole drilling of his eyes and wondering what corner of hell she would be damned to if she just let herself slide bonelessly down into his arms like she wanted to. It was the frivolous imaginings of a trashy romance novel consumer, but she was so bone-deep exhausted she almost didn't care anymore. She was probably dying, right? Didn't that give her a free pass to do whatever she wished with her last moments of life?

Quistis wiped the blur of exhaustion from her eyes like she wished she could scrub the headache from her brain. Maybe it was Seifer's intense stare, or maybe the barbed wire prickle of Ultimecea snipping away at the fragile threads of her life--whatever the cause, a million fists had somehow pried their way inside her skull and begun the pulsing heartbeat of their symphony against it, banging for all their clenched-tight knuckles were worth.

He didn't look good. Physically he was still handsome, still the rogue traitor wearing a subtle down of gold stubble across his chin, his smirk a lingering ghost behind those blazing emeralds, but there was something infinitely weary about him now. Something uncomfortably close to I-give-up, a look that didn't fit the Seifer Almasy she knew at all.

Some things changed. People died, relationships ended, mothers turned on their own children…but Seifer Almasy did not give up. Seifer had always been her one constant in life--if a derisive comment erupted from the back of her classroom, it emerged from Seifer's mouth. If someone disobeyed her orders to stay close in the Training Area to sneak off and slaughter their own T-Rex's in showy moon-arks of whipping blade, she knew without looking that it was Seifer. If Squall wore a new splotch of midnight blue across one of his cheekbones, Quistis knew without asking that Seifer had put it there.

So who was this man sitting across from her? Who was this man she'd fallen in love with--and still inevitably loved--this man who was still predictably cruel but sometimes unexpectedly gentle? This man who wanted to save her now instead of mock her, this man with all the insecurities and personal demons of a real human being, and not the sarcastic, self-loving machine who'd propped his muddy boots on one of her desks and ignored her lecture to loudly hit on the biggest pair of breasts in his sight line. And what were those malachite eyes trying to tell her now--not 'Blow me, bitch' or 'Fuck off, _Instructor_,' but something they'd tried to tell her before that she still didn't quite understand.

Quistis looked down at her fingers, tightly knotted in her lap, leaking tension from the taut drum-skin of her bloodless knuckles.

His lips were moving. The last time they'd shaped themselves around something, it had been her own lips, her yielding mouth and the thrown-back welcome of her throat, the arc of pearl that was her shyly exposed breast, partially shielded by a square of sheet.

"I'm sorry, what?" Quistis blinked away the opaque fog of her thoughts.

"Did Bria tell you how to stop it?"

She didn't have to ask what he was talking about. "No. I assumed, if we could kill Ultimecea, actually destroy her this time…"

"Instead of just stabbing Squall's little princess through the spine and forcing her to move on to someone else."

"Seifer--"

"What?" he snapped. "Don't beat around the bush with me, Instructor. I stabbed Rinoa through the fucking heart, and it still didn't stop her. Looks like the only way you escape this bitch is to die." The bitterness in his voice slashed its venom razor blades through her chest, and she wondered if that was his chosen escape route now. He'd told her before that he could still sometimes hear the sorceress inside his head, had yet to fully purge her from his veins.

Did that mean Seifer had decided his only remaining choice was to slide that blade still carrying its ghost stains of Rinoa's blood through the wall of his own chest, the raw meat it made of his organs streaming out in fluttering ribbons across the glittering starlight of Hyperion's proud length? When he looked her in the eyes like he was doing now, did he see his own death reflected a million times in the blue mirror surface of her gaze?

Quistis folded one lip beneath the other. "Are you going to kill me?" she asked in her most authoritative voice, the teacher's voice that rang with all the firmness of an educator putting their most unruly student in his place.

Seifer's head jerked back, green dilating to the shaded bottle glass of two large decorative plates, like a deer in the headlights, too fucking stupid to move--or in Zell's case too dumb to ask if they liked what they saw and just fucking pull his pants back up, to borrow a phrase of his. He'd uttered it after pantsing the martial artist in the middle of Garden in front of several female cadets, one of which he'd had a giant crush on at the time. Something Seifer had done a few times, Quistis recalled now, as though he had nothing better to do--studying, for instance--than stalk Zell through the halls, waiting for the most opportune moment to expose his thirteen-year-old genitalia to innocent eyes that would never be the same again.

"You said the only escape is death." Quistis explained calmly when he said nothing. "Isn't it easier if I die now so she can't get any stronger by feeding off me?"

"I'm not killing you! What kind of--what the fuck--why the hell would you even ask me that?"

The traitor had lost his composure for once. He'd lost many other things over the years--his temper, his sanity, the grudging respect for his battlefield skills he'd won from a few people, but she'd never seen this, this sputtering boy with his scared eyes and his wolf's snarl frozen in a strange rigor mortis of horror.

Quistis sighed. "I'm only illustrating a point, Seifer. There must be some way to stop her. Obviously killing the host body isn't enough." Referring to Rinoa so cavalierly made her wince, but she forced aside images of her friend's hair fraying into burnt curlicues against the caved-in ash of her face and continued. "I'm not particularly keen on dying right now, either by wasting away or any other means. She isn't invulnerable, we just haven't found her weak point yet."

He looked down at the floor, his brow tightening. "We don't even know where she is."

"We'll find her."

"No, we fucking won't. Stop sounding so fucking sure of yourself, _Instructor_." he snarled, and in the sneering curl of his lip she found the old Seifer, the Seifer waving to her from the back of the classroom while he 'accidentally' kicked Squall in the back of the head with a boot toe bouncing happily to its own imaginary beat.

"So you're saying give up." Quistis replied quietly, the pulverized fragments of her heart trickling into her stomach, into the acid pool pushing its ocean wave strength against the lining of her gut. She could only take it for so long before the vomit in her throat spilled between the glued-together wall of her molars.

"No." he said, fire in his eyes, in his hands where they suddenly clamped firmly over hers, like he could prevent her inexorable exit. "No, I'm saying fuck Ultimecea. Fuck fighting the bitch--why can't we just fucking diasappear? Can't you go far enough away that she can't reach you anymore? You just said she's not fucking invulnerable, right? Her magic has to have limits, especially if she doesn't even have a body right now."

"_You're _arguing against fighting?" she demanded incredulously, an almost-smile in her voice.

"We've already done that. Didn't work. So fuck trying to get rid of her--let Leonheart save the world if he wants to. Let fucking Chicken Wuss do it--I don't give a shit."

"I have duties, Seifer. And the last time we ran away together did not end well, if you'll recall."

"You always have fucking _duties_. Where the fuck have all your duties gotten you? When you were a kid you wanted a family, a husband, maybe some kids, all that fairytale shit, and instead now you're married to your fucking _duties_."

This was the kind of passion she'd always wanted him to exhibit as a student. This was the kind of passion that burned like disease in his eyes, the kind of passion that if he had just _harnessed_--"

"Marry me."

Quistis' jaw dropped like the final resounding swing of a judge's mallet.

What the fuck was he doing? Was he really asking this terminal woman whose friend he'd just brutally murdered a few months ago to be his wife? Was he really down on one knee right now, just like those fucking movies he hated where the cardboard cutout 'bad boy' reformed himself for the woman he loved and turned into some crying wussbag who was just so fucking _happy _he couldn't stand it?

The line of cold floorboard beneath his leg reminded him exactly what he was doing, the terrified rabbit-thunder of his heart and the arctic burn that swallowed his lungs in their needle teeth picture framing Quistis' startled face for him.

Squall had done this; he sure as hell could get through it too, and without shitting himself like Chicken Wuss would probably do. And if she said no, he wasn't going to walk in front of a train or something fucking gay like that--probably what that fag with his stupid ponytail would do if that annoying little girl turned him down.

A voice at the back of Seifer's head told him that he actually kind of liked Irvine, that this was always his first line of defense when threatened or panicked, the insults and the self-important sneer that formed the barrier that would save his heart from flash burning itself to ash right in the middle of his fucking chest.

What happened to his damn numbness? Where the fuck had that gone? And could he maybe, you know, please have it fucking back? How was he supposed to watch her lips form their rejection right in front of him, five inches from his fucking face, from his fucking _heart _with the kiln his chest had become already melting its edges and collapsing the perimeter to eat tirelessly at what was left?

Why the _fuck _wouldn't his hands stop shaking? She was going to notice, dammit, she was going to notice these spastic little twitches of horrified motion, and no one wanted to marry a wimp--especially not women like Quistis Trepe.

He didn't understand what he was doing. He had nothing to offer this woman, not a real home, not money or stability or even a shiny new ring--just himself, and when the hell had that ever been enough for anyone?

"Seifer--"

_I've been fucking miserable without you. If I could take it back and stab myself instead, I would. I'd have fucking thrown myself on that blade if I'd given myself time to think, if I'd really considered what I was doing. But I didn't, because I've always reacted first and thought later, and I'm fucking _sorry _and I know that will never be enough, but would you _please_, Quistis, fucking Hyne _please _just fucking say something? I'll give you your fucking fairytale if that's what you want. I'm not saying there's going to be a happily ever after, but I'll give you 2.5 fucking blonde blue-eyed kids if that's what you want_, _I'll, fuck, I don't know. Just tell me what I have to do. _

"Seifer--"

"You already said that." he snapped. _Good job, asshole. I'm sure she's completely overwhelmed with the romance of this proposal. Fuck, what woman _wouldn't _want to marry you? Hi, my name's Seifer Almasy; I love long walks on the beach, killing the innocent, and making you feel like shit. I have no job, no money, everyone hates me and I'm sure I'll destroy your life just like I destroyed mine, and oh yeah, while I'm being honest my penis is just average-sized, but other than that I'm a great catch. _

He lowered his head, staring down at his hands where they cupped hers, picturing the delicate pale little vines of her fingers creeping their way through his, forming a more official union like the one he was trying to offer her.

She leaned forward, and his heart long-jumped into the narrow hallway of his throat--it was hope and fear and vomit that all mingled together in that crowded passage, and it was then he noticed that he was bleeding, the tributaries of gore that soaked the front of his shirt winding their way down toward the waistband of his pants.

No. _She _was bleeding, from her nostrils, from the fissures her racking coughs tore into the tissue paper flesh of her own throat.

Seifer caught her as she pitched forward, his heart pounding a whole new rhythm against the front of his ribcage, one hand gently cradling the back of her head as she fell against his chest, her legs forming a wide v around his own that would have turned him on if he weren't so fucking terrified.

He clutched her tightly to him, feeling the vibrations of her attack inside his own bones, inside his own chest, jamming their earthquake fingers down into the savage ocean that was the pit of his stomach. It took almost two minutes for her to stop, for her head to finally splash exhaustedly against his shoulder, where it lay in its pond circle of blood, her mouth rippling goosebumps of air across the crimson stain it left on his faded coat.

"I can't just run away from this, Seifer." she said weakly.

He stared at the wall past her head, blinking back sudden tears. _"Crying about it isn't going to fucking do anything!" _That was his father's voice screaming at him from beyond the cloth skirt of the table he hid beneath.

"And I can't marry you."

He loosened his tongue enough to force out a question. "Why not?"

"I'm not sticking you with some woman who's trying to claw her way off her death bed right now. Just wait, Seifer. Wait until you meet someone who can give you a family and make you happy. I can't even have children."

"Why not?" he repeated numbly. Could he say anything else?

"Garden sterilizes all their female cadets. Pregnant soldiers are a liability."

"So Matron pissed and moaned about not being able to have children of her own and then took that option away from a bunch of kids?" he demanded incredulously.

Quistis stirred against his shoulder. "Don't be angry at her, Seifer. I doubt it was up to her, and at any rate, it's a logical move on their part. They can't have half of their mercenaries four months along, shooting machine guns and fighting enemy soldiers hand to hand. We knew what we were getting into. We came to Garden to learn to kill people, not to have babies."

"You didn't know what you were getting into. You were fucking ten."

"It doesn't matter, Seifer. I'm not interested in having children."

"I don't give a shit about that either, if that's why you're saying no. Look, I want to marry you anyway. You don't even have to take my fucking name if you don't want to." Was he a fucking glutton for punishment or something? How many times did she need to reject him before he finally understood?

Matron had given him up to Garden once she'd finally accepted that no one wanted to adopt her difficult, violent little 'son.' His real mother had given up on him long before Matron ever did, the Orphanage Gang had completely forgotten him--in class he'd been just an ugly side show beside the shining star that was Squall Leonheart, the ornamental clutter that was supposed to highlight the main decoration but instead just detracted from it's beauty.

So there he had it. The great Seifer Almasy, that perfect façade of a man he used to greet in the mirror each morning with his slicked-back hair and his proud eyes and arrogant sneer--that man was a brittle skeleton shell over the stinking, rotting creature below, and somehow everyone but him had seen it. That was why no one had wanted him, why this beautiful young woman with her burnished angel's hair and her arctic winter eyes let him down more gently than he deserved.

_Of course she doesn't fucking want you. Who the fuck would, you useless piece of shit? _

_"Get him out of here, get him the fuck out of here right now! I don't give a shit where you take him--I don't want him in my house anymore."_

_Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you too, Mom, for not standing up to him. I was your son too. _

He felt something wet staining his cheeks, the damp heat sinking through his pores into his bones, into his bloodstream, steaming magma where it touched his arteries. His chest slowly collapsed inward, like the slow magestic release of a hot air balloon billowing down on itself, and he sucked a deep breath, locked his shoulders tight against the ripple-jerk of the emotions that gripped him in fierce predator talons.

Quistis shifted her head to look up at him, lifted one trembling, red-streaked hand to his cheek. He firmed his jaw against her touch, like that would somehow staunch the sudden torrent that trembled in his lashes and dripped over the angrily blinking floodgate of his eyelids, down his face and into the pinched-tight crack of his shaking lips.

"_Fuck_." he snapped, and Quistis smiled faintly. He didn't know what the hell was wrong with him, but somehow he just couldn't make it fucking _stop_--it was like the world had just eaten a bullet and flopped its considerable deadweight down on his shoulders, showing him Raijin's and his mother's faces intermingled with one another in the final moments of its death throes, shredded meat throats and exploding heads and folding spines and blank-eyed, gape-mouthed death masks forming a gruesome slideshow in front of his eyes. He wrenched his arms from around Quistis and pressed the heels of his hands hard into his eye sockets, like if he could just push hard enough, far enough, they'd fade back into the recesses of his skull and he could save himself this humiliation.

"Seifer."

He jerked his arm away from her reaching fingers.

"I'm fucking sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm _fucking sorry_!" he screamed, the words ripping themselves out of his throat, and he knew now that this lonely little shit shack really had driven him insane at last--Ultimecea had nothing on this fucking place, because he'd never apologized while she held his puppet strings, not for anything, and even now he wasn't quite sure what he was sorry for, even while the words exploded in banshee shrieks from his mouth and forced the curdled bile in his stomach against his tongue where it pummeled furious stiletto fists into withered flesh.

He was sorry for this shitty place, for luring her here, he was sorry for killing Rinoa and his mother, sorry for not saving Raijin, sorry for taking away the most important thing in Squall's life, sorry even for his endless torment of Zell, who'd never really done anything to him except make a couple of stupid, naïve comments in class that pissed him off.

He was sorry for his whole fucking life.

Quistis held his face in her hands, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

_Don't look at me, don't look at me, don't fucking _look _at me--_

The fist coiling its molten lava fingers around his gut loosened slightly as her hands slid gently over his cheekbones, into the hair over the tops of his ears.

"Seifer, please don't do that." she whispered.

Too late. Why the hell did people always say that? Did they really think that by simply commanding someone to stop crying, they'd just quit blubbering all over themselves like some goddamned baby? Did she think he was going to lift his head up, wipe his eyes and say 'Don't worry about it, Quis, I was just shittin' ya' anyway.'?

No. This had all been penned up in his chest for far too long, and now there was no stuffing it back down behind his ribs where it would soak up all the ghosts and demons and memories like super-absorbant cotton buds.

You'd think this magnitude of a breakdown could happen in some other time or place--like not in front of this woman he respected the hell out of, this woman he'd tried so hard to force into the belief that he was unbreakable, indestructible--after all, wasn't that what all his schoolroom posturing had been about? Proving he was the biggest, the baddest, the greatest prodigy who'd ever strolled through her doors? The perfect soldier--brutal, merciless, athletic, emotionless, a bit headstrong and wild maybe, but a brilliant leader and fighter nevertheless.

And what was her perfect soldier doing now? Not performing his soldier's dance in the midst of blood helixes forming their random chain links around him, not charging fearlessly into battlefield mayhem with his lips peeled wide in a warrior's ululating cry. No. He was slumped on his knees in some hovel in the middle of nowhere, stinking of sweat and fish and probably the evil she had pumped into him, crying his fucking heart out.

He'd never really understood why people cried--he'd stopped when he was very young, learning early on that it didn't change anything, and it certainly didn't improve your emotions. All that shit about crying making you feel better, lifting a weight off you, healing a couple of cracks in your soul--was just that, shit. What the fuck was better about swollen, itchy eyes and streaming nostrils? What the fuck was better about knowing that you were just as weak as everyone else you'd once thought yourself superior to?

At least he understood the enigma behind tears now. He'd slowly begun to build a sluggish insight to their mystery over these past few months, and now, in this moment of humiliation and sloppy, shattering grief, he finally _finally _fucking got it.

Sometimes you just did. Sometimes the dam that held back all these little hurts and disappointments teetering on their stack of titanic agony and regrets just fucking burst. Sometimes you just couldn't do a fucking thing about it.

Even if you were Seifer Almasy.

Quistis pulled his head down on her shoulder, and for probably one of the first times in his life, he didn't resist.

He wanted to say 'This isn't fucking about you. You think I'm some goddamned wuss who can't put up with a little rejection?' He wanted to say 'Just ignore this. This isn't fucking happening.'

But no one could ignore _this_, and who was to say this wasn't about her? Not her kind rebuff, but a million other plot lines that the author of his life had forgotten to tie neatly up. Her slowly wasting body, feeling like fragile silk wrapped in a single thin layer around bone, her own pain and disappointments and regrets that he'd at least partially contributed to. Weaved in between his loss of his mother and Raijin and even Matron--before that bitch got ahold of her, before her mere whisper snapped taut his strings--was Quistis. Instructor Quistis, pointing out important side notes on her projector screen, soldier Quistis, fighting like some avenging angel beside him, sleeping Quistis, asleep across one of his dead-numbed arms. A thousand different faces of this woman he hadn't really tried to know until it was too late for either of them.

She held him gently around the shoulders, and he thought that if--_when_--she lived long enough to marry, the jerk better realize just how fucking lucky he was.

* * *

Three hours later, leaving Quistis napping exhaustedly on his cot, Seifer stepped down off his porch into fresh powder, kicking up feather-plumes of it with his heavy boots.

The hand he lifted to that cottage door weighed a thousand pounds, a million pounds, and it's echo rolled like thunder through the small home.

Deacon barked twice, and then abruptly shut up.

He waited almost a minute, then banged again, trembling the tiny porthole window in the door this time.

The swing of oak dusted in its confection sugar's coat of fine snow revealed her unsmiling face, too-bright eyes cradled in their orbits of tearful red, looking much like his own probably appeared.

"Get your fucking coat on." he snapped.

* * *

Quistis woke up and rolled over into solitude.

It should have felt familiar--she'd been doing it for a long time now, after all, yet somehow knowing he'd been there just a few short hours earlier sharpened the knife that slid between the spaces of her ribs.

A search of the cabin revealed that he was indeed gone--and not just him, but Hyperion as well, the gun blade missing from its little corner of cobwebs and shadow.

The jagged incisors of apprehension tore her chest muscles and forced her shaking legs to stand, to stumble their weak-kneed journey out onto a snowy porch into the middle of pitch black night.

The inverted bowl of midnight glared down at her, revealing just a sliver of moon through ominous clouds, its chill leaking through the pores of that contused sky and into her atrophied skeleton frame. She stepped down into six inches of frozen precipitation and zipped her jacket, pushing herself between the tree branches that sheltered the graves of Seifer's mother and Raijin.

Ahead, the cottage that housed Bria and her young sibling seeped puddles of illumination, squares of gold butter that framed the aging sides in flower patch splotches of warmth.

She tasted her heart as she lifted one frozen-stiff hand to knock.

Quistis huddled for an eternity on that splintered rectangle of porch, listening for signs of life from within, one long stretch of forever that smashed her lungs down to nothing.

When Seth finally opened the door on his bloodless face, one hand gripping the scruff of his dog's neck, she knew by the sudden shipwreck sinking of her heart that he didn't have good news for her.

She asked anyway. "Is Seifer here?"

He shook his head, his hair sweeping out two separate raven blurs of denial. "No. He kidnapped my sister."


	26. Chapter 25

**Chapter Twenty Five**

Deling City

Galbadia

Two weeks after Bria vanished without a word to him, she came back.

The end of his night, that final half-hour wind-down period during which he lay in bed studying the ceiling and thinking of his friends, their distance, his loneliness, ended abruptly with the jarring, beatbox rhythm of his phone's ringtone--or should he say that was where everything truly began?

Zell knocked the slender object off the cluttered nightstand and into his hand, flipping it open.

"Yo."

"Zell--"

"Quisty!" he blurted out, grinning as he sprang upright, swinging his legs over the side of his bed and slapping one muscular thigh with a free hand. "Great to hear from ya'! How are you doing? Is everything ok at T. Garden?"

The static hiss of her silence punched an angry fist through his stomach. "Quis? Something wrong?"

He heard her sigh. "There's too much to go into right now, Zell. I need to know…have you seen Seifer?"

"Seifer?" Zell snorted, cracking his knuckles. "No; why the hell would he come back here? Squall'd kill him."

"And Bria's not there either." It wasn't a question.

He sank slowly back down onto his matted covers. "How did you know that?"

Another sigh. "There have been some…interesting developments here, to say the least. I think Seifer might be heading your way…with Bria."

The fist turned into one collasal monolith of needle-tipped ice, stabbing upward into the throttled worm hole of his throat. His mouth flopped drunkenly open, closed again, unrolled back into the lax fish jaw of an oxygen-starved cod.

"Zell? Are you still there?"

"Yeah." He rubbed a hand through his hair. "I'm just…I'm…Bria? With _him_?"

"Yes. Not by choice, but yes."

"_What_?!" Zell exploded, cannon-balling onto his feet, bashing the lamp from his nightstand with one flailing hand as he settled in a frantic back and forth cadence of shuffling feet and arcing fists and sputtered protests, his toes printing agitated tracks across the ugly carpeting. "Did he hurt her? I'll kill him--I'll fucking _kill _that asshole!"

"Please don't." Quistis requested quietly, and those two words stopped him dead, stopped his pacing and his ranting and his vengeful, bloody reunions that played themselves like gore-soaked horror films inside his head. He sat down, this time on the floor because he was simply too far away from the bed, too far away from its comforting softness and its promise of stability.

Something that tasted like bile burned his tongue--but this could not be bile, because he'd tasted that before, and this…this was much too hot, much too acidic, much too…everything for it to make sense.

"Quisty…you love him don't you?"

"That doesn't matter. I understand your reservations about him, and I fully acknowledge them. Just…please don't kill him. I don't think he means Bria any harm."

"So you do love him. Damn. I mean…I guess I kinda' suspected, but…I dunno, I guess I hoped you were, like, you know, just screwing him."

He could hear the hint of a wry smile in her voice. "I'm glad you think so highly of my morals."

"Sorry, Quisty, I just…why _Almassy_? Almasy, whatever." he corrected himself before she could scold him.

He could hear his own breathing echoed back at him in the silence that followed.

"I don't think there's any way I can justify…feeling what I do for him. He's…"

"A rude asshole?" Zell offered.

"Well, yes."

"But if _you _like him, Quisty…you're the smartest person I know."

"Let me know if either one shows up. I'm taking temporary medical leave from Trabia Garden; I'll be in Deling City soon."

"Medical leave?" he repeated numbly, confused again.

"I'll see you soon, Zell."

It was the last thing he heard before the shotgun blast of his door banging open muffled all other noises, before his phone with its flatline noise of disconnection slipped from his fingers and he scrambled frantically into fighting position as four Galbadian soldiers jammed their way into his bedroom, their rifles blending into the smeared black of the long, smooth arcs that brought them to synchronized firing position.

* * *

Arguing with this bitch was getting Seifer absolutely nowhere. It took him the entire two days of their journey back to Deling City for him to harass Bria into revealing where Zell was staying--the only orphanage gang member's residence that she actually knew, or so she said--and even then he got the impression she'd probably only told him on the basis that she'd managed to convince herself that Chicken Wuss could beat the shit out of him, really teach Seifer a lesson.

Fat fucking chance.

And now, crouched in the hedges circling the small two-story house with its blatantly matronly arrangement of tidy flower pots, windowsill decorations and antique lace curtains, she wouldn't stop shifting around, wouldn't stop brushing up against him every two seconds or so with a tense sigh. At least she'd stopped talking when they led Zell in handcuffs from the neat little house, one holding his head down with a gloved hand while the other two flanked him, rifles at attention, broad shoulders squared into the soldier's ever alert mountain slope of wariness.

The fourth lay in a rag doll pile on his bed of broken gem glass, where he'd landed after Zell had shoved him through the upstairs window.

A stooped old woman watched from her swept-clean porch, clutching her plaid checked blanket around the bony frailness of her hunched shoulders--it was a natural demonstration of time running its natural course, and yet somehow it was a heartbreaking sight, because the woman's brittle frame reminded him of Quistis' killing virus.

Quistis' killing virus, the woman wearing his mother's eyes and Rinoa's smiling lips--

He loosened Hyperion, and waited impatiently for the old woman to step back inside.

They were almost to the armored vehicle that would take Zell to his traitor's prison cell--the same prison cell that had trapped Seifer for years, except the bars of this jailhouse were just the mental straitjacket restraints of his abused mind, more resistant than any five-inch slab of iron and steel--when the woman finally gave up observing and stepped back into the warmth of her house.

In that split second of time when the click of her shutting door was still an echo riding the maintained quiet of the peaceful suburban neighborhood, Seifer moved.

The cross blow of flashing steel split one man's chin like a knockdown left hook, except this was no simple marriage of white-knuckled fist and vulnerable jaw point--this sliced all the way through the soldier's skull, chopping his face in half like the dividing line between two warring countries, sketched out in blood.

He pirouetted, stabbed, slashed, and the random splash work art of his murders settled into abstract designs across the sidewalk.

Zell gaped at him.

Seifer snapped the handcuffs off his wrists with the set of keys he found in one of the dead men's uniforms, then tossed them carelessly down on the street, glancing around to the darkened windows and firmly shut doors of a dozen uncaring neighbors.

Even in this quiet little suburb, they were probably used to soldier's interruptions, to kicked-in doors and rumbling military vehicles.

Bria climbed from her hiding place, hugging herself around the stomach.

Seifer yanked open the door of the Galbadian APC, sliding in behind the wheel and scowling over at the tentative reunion taking place between Zell and his girlfriend. Just fucking precious--they were breaking his goddamned heart. "Get in the truck."

"What the hell's going on?" Zell demanded.

"Just get in the fucking truck, Chicken Wuss. You really want to keep standing around here?" He stared hard at Bria. "Tell him everything you told me."

Zell stepped protectively in front of her. "Tell me what?"

Seifer swallowed hard, and twisted the key violently in its ignition. Had he ever thought to one day find himself uttering these words to Zell of all people?

"I need your help." _Like he'll give a shit about _that_. _"Actually, it's really Quistis who needs your help. Now get in the fucking truck, Wuss."

"What's he talking about?" Zell asked Bria, his fists knotting automatically, his voice lifting a couple of octaves--even the slightly thick martial artist could grasp the solemnity of this situation--Seifer Almasy of all people showing up in the middle of the night to rescue him from jail because he needed help with something involving Quistis. "What's wrong with her?"

"Truck. Now." Seifer snapped, and revved the engine.

"Just get in, Zell." Bria said tiredly before he could argue again, opening the passenger door and climbing unhappily up beside a scowling Seifer.

* * *

With Irvine walking quietly along behind him, Squall bashed his way through the locked barrier of the door that stood before him, crashing forward into the onyx murk of absolute darkness with the loud splinter of shattering wood, gun blade naked in his hand.

Irvine grabbed him by the elbow. "Come on, man. Calm down. Shouldn't we be going about this a little more quietly?"

Squall ignored him and yanked out of his grasp. He didn't really give two shits if this entire floating palace monstrosity came hurtling down around his ears, burying him under the grit of its cathedral ceilings and ornate staircases and perfectly fucking beautiful chandeliers.

-_Its curved surface caught the strings of light off the chandelier dangling above, illumination that danced in a rainbow prism over her pale skin-_

Clenching his jaw, Squall summoned an illumination spell in his hand, cupping the globe of flickering turquoise in his scarred palm. It leaked light like the willowy tentacles of some malnourished sea life into the room surrounding them, sliding between his fingers like mist, like her blood, streaking off Hyperion in pregnant droplets of shining ruby that he would never forget--

He firmed his jaw again, screwing his molars down tight together until he could feel the vibrations of his tension through his entire face.

Irvine was staring concernedly at him, missing that damn hat for once. Why the hell did he feel the need to wear it everywhere he went, anyway? What the hell had it ever done for him? It was just two felted arcs of material sewn together, dressed up with some leather and the old-fashioned charm radiating from the twinkling eyes beneath its brim. It wouldn't save him in battle. It wouldn't keep Selphie from leaving him. Squall had had far more than some stupid, worn-out headpiece--his promises, his dreams, his struggles, his shattering pleas--and none of them had done him one bit of good in the end.

In the end, he'd still had to watch her skin drip from her bones in the blackened-crisp peels of overcooked meat.

In the end, he'd let Seifer live again. Seifer, who'd looked just as damaged as Squall felt, on his knees in front of the static drip drip drip of her blood--

He shone his magic carefully around the room, avoiding Irvine's stare. The dome of blue splashed out in little ocean splinters of highlighter that picked up small details here and there: a saw dust-sprinkled shelf, empty save for its piles of powdered wood, smooth-rounded walls carrying the fresh sheen of paint strong enough to burn in his nostrils, a few large footprints stamped out in the unfinished room's ashy carpet of stray woodchips and dust.

"What's that?" Irvine whispered, and Squall turned to follow the line of his friend's finger like a beacon through the darkness, aimed like the arrow Rinoa's death had fired into his heart.

He propped his weapon against the shelf.

It was smooth-domed glass, held secure by the straitjacket grip of the metal bars criss-crossing its lustrous surface, like vines piecing together the crumbling exterior of an aging house.

He could vaguely see something floating inside.

"Shit." Irvine said.

Squall pressed his face to the dome's winter chill, his breath flattening out across it in the smashed-flat pancake silhouette of an irregular cloud. His magic showed him half-formed fingers--long, sinuous, flesh-colored sticks, melded together in the conjoined webbing of a duck's feet. The pale blobs of two slender hands hovered like twin moons in a nighttime sky, drifting beside the emerging curve of a woman's shapely hips.

An infant's wispy mop top of new hair extended from its head.

The face that stared back at him had no features, just the blank palette of stretched-tight flesh it wore over high cheekbones and an angular chin.

"What the hell do you think this is?" Irvine asked, stepping up beside him, setting one hand hesitantly on the glass beside Squall's face. He jerked at the collar of the jumpsuit he wore, courtesy of some oblivious dock worker he'd 'borrowed' it from, pulling it from skin that suddenly felt too hot.

Squall shook his head silently.

Gently, he pasted tender brown eyes into the eyeless sockets of this creature, the pert nose she'd turned snootily up in her father's direction when he pissed her off, the rosebud lips that used to attack him when he least expected it--and the sunrise glow of his ring, sparkling at him from her left finger--

He squeezed his eyes shut against unexpected tears.

"I don't know." he replied brusquely when he was sure he could talk without the pathetic tremble he felt vibrating his vocal cords sneaking into his voice.

Irvine looked at him again, the strands of hair sneaking loose from his ponytail spilling into too-perceptive eyes. He stared long enough that Squall could feel himself beginning to lose his temper, and finally, just when he experienced the starting tremble that was the warning of the snap to come, Irvine turned away.

He checked the watch strapped to his right wrist. "Night duty's s'pposed to be coming on pretty soon. We better switch places with them before anyone gets suspicious."

_Yeah, because the broken door doesn't make it glaringly obvious that someone was here that wasn't supposed to be. _

Squall watched Irvine slip a small phone from his pocket, flip it open and snap a quick picture as he retrieved the gunblade.

The faceless woman glared after him as he swept from the room, Rinoa's eyes cutting through his back while he stiffened his back against her persistent phantom.

* * *

Train

Trabia Station

Quistis' mind offered her glimpses of another life, feeding her the broken, shaky pieces of cinema beamed from a shoddy projector--they were interspersed with the monotonous drone of the overhead departure announcement, and the flickering strips of black and white supplied to her by the newspaper in the hands of the passenger beside her. She could smell the lingering scent of its newsprint, and the subtle woodsy after brush of his cologne.

_-the ocean's waves pounding their hammer fists against his ankles while blonde hair flashed at his thigh-_

She could see the emerald smear of the forest outside beginning the side scroll blur of an old arcade game as the train picked up speed, and the wind blowing strands of gold from thick-lashed jade.

_-his hair streaming like hers, only shorter, unsecured by the white ribbon that wound like braided angel's feathers through shoulder-length yellow-_

She could feel the shifting of the man next to her, the swaying of the whistling locomotive beneath her--and his hands, wound protectively around her stomach, his callused warrior's fingers forming a defensive tent over the bulge of her gut, shielding her from the spray of the ocean, from the predator swoops of hungry gulls, from the cloying scent of that damn newspaper, from the rocking of the train that rendered her vaguely nauseous, from the invisible fingers picking apart the frail strands of her life, from the slow leak claret of Rinoa's blood, and the Hyne-awful smell of her burning hair--

The world flash-burned out from beneath Quistis' feet in a fireworks spray of neverending white.

_She stepped down from the passenger side of Bria's car onto the hard-packed glint of warm sand, and felt her foot shoot out from beneath her. _

_The landing was not a subtle one, noisy and expletive-filled as her balance failed and like some ridiculous panicked cow--which was exactly how she felt--Quistis pitched forward onto her hands and knees, burning them on the sun-hot ground. _

_"Dammit." she muttered, her glasses dropping somewhere beside her left knee, the charming white lighthouse with its fresh coat of paint hazing over into ambiguity, splashed in the fuzzy whitewash of her temporary blindness. She heard Bria's door slam as she pushed back onto her heels, saw the young woman's concerned face beneath its new triangle of boyishly-styled hair, a strawberry radiance around her flushed cheeks. _

_"You ok?"_

_Quistis sighed. "Yes. I don't know how you put up with this." _

_"Eh, it's worth it. Not pleasant--especially with Zell falling all over himself and not letting me do _anything _the whole time--but worth it." Bria turned away with a smirk and yelled toward the screen door of the long-ago orphanage. "Hey, Almasy! You're enormously pregnant wife just fell on her ass, and I can't get her up by myself."_

_"Thank you." Quistis murmured sarcastically, dusting sand from her palms. "But I can manage just fine on my own. If he sees me like this, he'll nag me to death about being more careful."_

_"Interesting how women are always considered the naggers of the relationship, isn't it?" Bria agreed, crouching down to grip Quistis by one bare elbow. "Ok, you're sure you didn't bang anything, right?"_

_"No. Although I don't think he appreciated the jostling." she replied dryly, setting a hand on the eight-and-a-half-month swelling protruding from the waistband of her maternity pants. She could already feel the beginning rainstorm persistence of tiny fists punching their determined way through the layers of her pregnancy to the taut skin of her belly. Not even born yet, and just as aggressive as his father. She was certainly going to have her hands full. _

_The screen door banged open, and Quistis suppressed a groan. _

_"Mommy!" the three-year-old girl perched on Seifer's broad shoulders shrieked. He set her on the ground and glared at Quistis, sitting pathetically in her indent of sand and gravel, feeling like a whale in comparison to the trimly muscular figure he cut. Dressed in a white tank top and black trousers bloused out around dusty boots, Seifer stepped off the front porch and reached the still-struggling ex-SeeD before she could even heave one side of her off the ground, grasping both of her arms. _

_The toddler cradled now in Bria's arms swung her feet breezily. "Guess, what, mommy? Uncle Seifer taught me a new word today." _

_Seifer's hands froze on the still-toned iron of Quistis' slim arms. "That's a secret, remember, Della?" _

_Bria glowered at him. "Oh, really?" _

_"Yeah." Della said, oblivious to the sudden tension in her uncle's body. "What does 'fucking' mean, mommy?"_

_"Uncle Seifer said that, huh?" Bria replied, her eyebrows scrunching closer together. _

_"Yeah, he said 'fucking bird.' What's a 'fucking'?" _

_"It's something Uncle Seifer shouldn't have said to you, sweetheart. So don't say it again, ok? Now why don't you go see what I bought for you? It's in the car, in the backseat."_

_The child obliged happily, hopping down from her mother's hip and running for the vehicle parked in front of Matron and Cid's old home. _

_Bria marched up behind Seifer and smacked him soundly in the back of the head. _

_"Ow! Shit!" he snapped, turning his tense stare away from Quistis and onto her. "What the hell was that for?"_

_"Don't say that in front of her, for Hyne's sake, you asshole!" Bria hissed. "The last thing I need is some miniature 'Almassy' running around." she reprimanded him, using her husband's insult. _

_"It just slipped out." he replied, his voice surly. He looked back toward Quistis, and she saw the beginning blackening of anxiety creep in around the edges of his irises, but he said nothing to her. _

_"We need to be getting out of here, anyway."_

_"Tell Zell hello." Quistis called after Bria as she rounded the car to the driver's side. _

_"Yep." Bria acknowledged, picking Della up and walking back around into their sightline, carrying her daughter in one arm, the stuffed toy she'd purchased dangling from the girl's chubby fingers. _

_"Bye Uncle Seifer, Aunt Quisty!" Della yelled loudly as her mother strapped her into the back carseat, waving furiously until Bria leaned in to kiss the top of her head, then slammed the door. _

_"He says he misses you." Bria waved as well, keys already jangling from one fist. "He'll probably be by in a couple of days." _

_"Great. Another Wuss visit." Seifer muttered._

_Quistis frowned and punched him in the shin. _

_He hissed out an epitaph and scooped Quistis easily up into his arms as the rooster tail streaks of illumination that were Bria's taillights vanished into the distance, mounting the porch steps and shouldering aside the door. _

_"This is very unnecessary." Quistis protested, making a half-hearted attempt to climb down out of his embrace. _

_He clutched her more tightly in response, depositing her onto the gouged leather of a much-loved recliner, his hands knotting between his knees as he squatted in front of her. _

_"Seifer," Quistis sighed, guessing what was coming. _

_He reached up and swished his hand in one smooth arc across her cheek, scattering loose hair, moving around to the back of her neck, the natural hostility of his eyes softening slightly. _

_She liked this look, this reminded innocence of the wide-eyed boy who'd chased her through the same ocean slowly eating her front lawn. _

_This was still the same boy who'd heckled Squall from the back of her classroom, the same boy who'd disobeyed her every command, who'd contributed to the removal of her instructor's rank. _

_The same boy who'd followed his mother into hell, and risen up from the ashes of his prison like the long-dead phoenix who must twist free its wings from its bed of crusted cinders. _

_She couldn't see the madness in his eyes anymore, the fever brilliance that burned like guiding candle flames leading the way into hell's dark cavern. There was just her right now, reflected back from the stubborn slits of his narrowed gaze. _

_"Are you still bleeding?" Seifer demanded._

_"Seifer--"_

_"Are you?" _

_"It's nothing to worry about." _

_He snorted loudly. "Yeah, bleeding while you're pregnant is usually a fucking _good _sign."_

_"Seifer, _I'm fine_. It's probably because he's spending all his spare time punching and kicking me. That can't be gentle on my body."_

_"Well did you ask Bria about it?"_

_"No, I did not. I didn't think it was necessary. Everything will be fine; I've only got about two more weeks to go anyway." _

_He blew out a harsh breath and turned his face away. She waited for him to swing back toward her, idly playing with his hair. _

_The fierce look he gave her told Quistis he was struggling to batter his emotions back down, to keep himself locked in the rigid control he'd so lacked at Garden. But he was still Seifer, and so the heat brewing in his stomach leaked into his eyes, the smoldering gemstone intensity of them making her slightly nervous. _

_How was he still able to do that? It felt like he'd reached down her throat, all the way into the cavity of her chest to manhandle the hiding timidity of her soul out into the light._

_"I'm just worried, dammit." he said gruffly, looking down at the bulge of his son resting on top of her lap, one hand gently curving over it. _

_Quistis smiled. The great intimidator of B. Garden's halls, the snarling façade everyone had feared, would be just as much a scared daddy as every other normal man. _

_She framed his face in her hands, dragged it up to hers, kissed him firmly on the lips. _

_He smiled when she pulled back, the beautiful smile that reminded Quistis of late afternoon sunlight, the smell of fresh cookies, and the little boy sneaking too-hot treats into his mouth while Matron's back was turned. _

_Seifer kissed her again before standing up, and it was then that she felt the wetness soaking the front of her pants, then that she watched the slow motion creep of staining red, and the frantic widen of his eyes as they completed their long slide back around to her. _

_* * *_

_"Mr. Almasy, your wife has a hemorrage."_

_"Well then fucking fix it!"_

_"She might not make it through the birth. The baby probably won't either." _

_"You've got to be shitting me. What kind of fucking doctor are you? Stop talking to me, asshole! Go fucking help her!" _

_-The stagnant white flash of hospital walls, sneaking through the fluttering slits of her eyes-_

_"Quistis! _Quistis_!"_

_-Seifer's son, beating his desperate way free of the ticking time bomb of death her womb had become-_

_"I said fucking _help_ her!"_

_-The jarring crash of his helpless anger, taken out on the nearest object, the scuffle of his resistance between the restraining hands of hospital security-_

_-The unoiled squeak of her stretcher's journey, and the spotlight paint flecks of random black, oozing across the little she could see, a viscous layer of unconciousness thrusting its scrambling fingers inside her brain-_

_When she opened her eyes this time, they peeled all the way back, and the first thing she saw was him, hunched on top of the hard orange plastic of a chair pushed into the corner of the room, head in his hands. _

_His hair gleamed in the bright florescence of the light above her bed, shooting her the prismatic arc of rainbow gold. _

_Quistis smiled tiredly. "Seifer."_

_His head snapped up instantly, like her voice was the marionette's string Ultimecia had once fastened him to, and he was suddenly beside her bed, so quickly she wondered if something could be wrong with her eyes as well. The vibrant crayon squiggles of his fatigue through too-bright jade lent him the appearance of a recovering drunk, and she knew he hadn't slept all night. _

_"You ok?" he asked gruffly. It was his I-don't-really-care-I'm-just-curious voice, the one that always made her smile, because he still tried so hard sometimes to be the disruptive jerk smirking at his fed-up instructor from the back of her classroom, the strutting boy with his I'm-just-looking-out-for-#1 attitude. He destroyed the illusion when he leaned in to gently run his hand down the side of her face, loosening the strands of hair crusted to her cheek with sweat and no doubt several tears. _

_"I'm fine." she told him reassuringly. Her stomach clenched hard around her next words before she even got them out, like a jagged-lipped wound resisting the removal of its inflictor. "What about…the baby?"_

_His lips split around the biggest, most euphoric smile she'd ever seen--it was his I'm-a-new-daddy smile, the prideful elation that is the trademark of all new fathers, and it didn't end even when she reached up to grab his face in her hands, didn't end when she pulled his grinning mouth to hers, not even when the smoke of her happy little fabricated life dissolved around her-_

-and she landed with a convulsive jerk in consciousness, his smile tattooed across the backs of her eyelids.

Quistis' temple smacked the window as she jumped in her seat, and through the sleep fog coating her mind, she heard the grinding of the train's brakes grabbing track and leisurely pulling the locomotive to a gradual halt.

The broken glass of sleep grit scratched her eyes as she rubbed them tiredly, and abruptly, she suddenly felt like screaming, like aiming the point of her elbow right through the center of the window reflecting her exhausted visage back at her, the unnaturally pale woman with the hollow face that she didn't even recognize--because she didn't have the kind of future the dream had so cruelly shown her, and it suddenly really, really pissed her off.

The furnace surge of Quistis' anger flickered out like a dying candle just as quickly as it flash-burned its path through her aching heart.

She didn't have the physical or mental fortitude to carry this kind of resentment right now. And really, what was the point? It wouldn't stop the slow cancer that was Ultimecea from eating away at her life, and it certainly wouldn't shut off the ticking time bomb she could feel squatting on her shoulders like an overweight child.

Neither could it banish the wan-faced stranger in the window's harsh mirror. She rubbed tiredly at her eyes once more, then gathered her hands in a defensive knot over the bulge of her lightweight backpack.

This would be the second-to-last stop before Deling City, if memory served her correctly and if her wasting disease hadn't begun consuming her brain as well. Just a short break between scrolling forestland and the flecked gold of serene beaches and the million twinkling starlights that comprised the bustling metropolis--firefly studs that she could see right now, scorching a path across her too-sensitive retinas--the station served as a brief resting point from the city that lay a couple of miles away, giving the train's operators time to reconfigure its equipment to withstand the magical barrier that had been erected over the city at some point in the last few weeks. It was the original station, tidy but austere, without the glitz and over-glossed paint of the inner city location they would be arriving at within the half hour.

Quistis stared out her little square of polished glass while around her passengers stirred, taking advantage of the opportunity to stretch cramped legs and arch kinked backs.

And then her dream rippled out once more to touch her, and she braced herself for the fall--only this time there would be none, no pyrotechnics explosion of sudden unconciousness, and certainly to temporary peace of mind--because the section of dream that whip cracked out to sink it's fisherman's hooks into her fragile skin, was his voice.

"Sit the fuck down!" it hollered, and she glimpsed a flash of blonde out of the corner of her eye.

He was beautiful and proud, clench-jawed and deadly, marching along down the train aisles to terrified exclamations, dragging the train's petrified conductor alongside him, Hyperion slung casually over one shoulder.

He was Seifer Almasy, wearing his own face and not the unnoticeable anonymity one of his disguises would have lent him, and all of the passengers were staring at him in abject horror.

Quistis swallowed the cold lump of her stomach.

He let go of the conductor when he reached Quistis, and gave the man a hard shove. "I'm blowing this train up in five minutes. Get everyone off or don't, I don't give a shit." His eyes glanced off Quistis' startled face. "Come on." His fingers dug harshly into her arm, and one rough yank brought her easily to her feet. "Jesus. Fucking eat something, would you?" Seifer snapped. "The station's going to. Just to let you know." He poked the man in the shoulder with Hyperion's fatal point.

And then he had ahold of her in much the way he'd strong-armed the poor conductor along, and as a few muffled sobs broke out, he pushed her out the nearest exit. She dropped her bag as she landed, and he grabbed it before she could reclaim it.

"What are you doing?" Quistis demanded, the density of her indignant confusion weighting her voice with her old authority, even if Garden's former golden child instructor was just a shadow of her former self. "Seifer! Answer me!"

To her horror, he sheathed his gun blade and ignored her, working his way methodically along the length of the train, depositing bundles at regular intervals that were only half-visible in the moon's slow leak of pearl, but discernible enough to Quistis' soldier's eyes.

"Seifer!"

He looked up at her for just a second, his stare feral green in the odd mishmash of moonlight and forever day emanating from the always-illuminated Deling City. "What am I doing, Instructor? I'm starting a fucking war. This pussy-footing shit isn't going anywhere. Not to mention, this should get Pubes' attention."

_Squall? _

"You are not blowing up this train." Quistis said coldly as a few panicked trickles of people began to issue from the stalled locomotive. "Seifer. Listen to me."

He glanced up again and scowled. "I gave them five minutes to get off the fucking thing. If they're too stupid to believe me, then they probably need to be taken out of the gene pool anyway."

From Deling City, a sudden echoing boom rocked the city's foundation, like the loudest thunderclap of the century's largest storm. Fleeing passengers screamed.

He grabbed Quistis again as he stalked past, dragging her along like some hysterical child demanding parental attention in the middle of the department store's busiest section. She protested, but not loudly--bewilderment had filed her voice down into just a ragged nub of a croak, and either he didn't hear her or simply didn't care, the latter of which was probably more likely, knowing him.

Five minutes into their brisk walk, she watched him stretch a hand skyward, lifting it even with his head--beyond her reach--his palm filled with the cylindrical shadow of his detonator.

The muffled clap and ensuing report hurt her ears.

Behind them, fire devoured the world.

* * *

If he weren't so inclined toward manliness--and the intense need to keep up the illusion of the aforementioned manliness in front of his girlfriend--Zell might have crapped himself when the second explosion went off.

"Shit!" he screamed, throwing his hands overhead to protect himself from the ashy rainstorm of falling debris, and searching frantically through the haze for Bria, who appeared a few feet away coughing up what sounded to be a lung. How many goddamned explosives had Seifer gotten his hands on, anyway?

Old and new hatreds aside, it had seemed like a good idea when Seifer first presented it--blowing up Deling City's main transportation system would stir some panic in the citizens and rouse suspicion and unrest in regards to just how well their government could protect them, not to mention partially seal off the city to people trying to get inside, all while causing a whole slew of problems for city officials. That, and Zell's affection for all things that went boom made it inevitable that sooner or later he would cave.

Now he wasn't so sure. Seifer had never been easy to control after all--the man was certifiably insane, even before the whole sorceress ordeal--but recent events had obviously snapped whatever tenuous control he'd once wielded over his mind. He'd stabbed Rinoa in cold blood--and even though part of Zell could acknowledge that she'd probably been lost to them a long time ago, he couldn't make the larger part of himself forgive the traitor for that--apparently disappeared to live as a hermit for a while, tried to kill Bria, and then abruptly returned to civilization to commit terrorist acts and flash his very famous face around when he was supposed to be publicly dead.

He'd agreed to help Seifer for two very important reasons--noisy explosions aside--and that was to save Quistis, and give Squall one last chance at the man who'd murdered the woman he was supposed to spend the rest of his life with. Theirs had been the fairytale story of princesses and knights that Matron coaxed them to sleep with, and even if the details hadn't been quite as perfect as the printed version's, everyone had known they would get the happily ever after.

Except Seifer had ripped out the last few pages, and used them to wipe his ass.

Zell grabbed Bria by the elbow and hurried them into the crush of panicking, escaping citizens, into the anonymous chaos that only a truly out-of-control miscellany of flying elbows and flailing hands and stuttering feet can offer.

Zell could knock out the man whose hands landed inappropriately on his girlfriend's body--and he did--in one precisely-aimed blow. He could fight off probably thee to four men of varying heights and weights at the same time, bare-fisted to the ominous glint of their weapons. He could take just about anyone at Garden in hand to hand combat.

But he wasn't a match for Seifer, and he knew that. That was Squall's role to fill.

Squall, possibly Garden's most talented gun blade master since its humble beginnings, unequaled by anyone except his psychopath rival--and AWOL for the most part since Rinoa's death, aside from occasional recon missions, usually with Irvine.

Word would spread that Deling City hadn't begun blowing up until people started reporting sightings of the supposedly dead Seifer Almasy.

Squall would find his way back.

* * *

Quistis glared wordlessly into stained brown concrete, arms folded resolutely in front of her chest.

Seifer, straddling an oil drum like it was the sway-backed curve of some broken down old Chocobo, pointedly ignored her. Surrounding them in the chill dankness of the old arms manufacturing plant that had been abandoned and condemned to eventual destruction in favor of a newer, shinier building, Selphie, Irvine, Zell and Bria formed a loose semi-circle of tense hands and burgeoning tempers.

She hadn't said one fucking word since they'd reached Deling City two hours ago. What did she expect him to do, dance on one of the fucking conveyor belts and spell out 'I'm sorry' with his arms? She hadn't cut off his nutsack entirely. Besides, he hadn't done anything wrong. Well, depending on your perspective, anyway. Langer's Locomotive might not agree with him on that point.

"She knows more than she's telling." Seifer insisted, lacing his hands behind his head and narrowing his eyes in Bria's direction. "Get her to talk, Wuss, or I'll do it for you."

"Don't threaten her." Zell snapped, his hands surging up into a boxer's coiled threat. "Squall's gonna' kill you when he gets back, Almassy. You should probably start worrying about that."

"The bitch lied to you." Seifer snapped right back at him. "Jesus fucking Hyne. The brain in your dick is even smaller than the one in your head, and I didn't think that was possible."

"Knock it off." Irvine said quietly, landing a flat-footed kick to the side of Zell's leg that crumpled his left side for just the moment it took him to regain his balance. "Look, Almasy, we appreciate you bringing all this to our attention. But beyond that--"

"Don't talk to me like you're trying to fucking negotiate with me. Quistis is dying. You'll never pull your heads out of your asses in time to save her, so you need me." He craked his knuckles loudly, liking the sound of that. It had been a long time since anyone had needed Seifer Almasy, and it felt flimsily familiar, like trying on a ratty old coat, drafty but supplely perfect, meeting each dip and curve like the hands of an experienced lover.

"You know as much as we do. Which is nothing." Irvine pointed out.

Seifer shrugged casually. "I'll figure something out." It was the kind of confidence he wished he had but didn't. Truthfully, he didn't have a clue what to do--but how could he really admit that, to them or to himself, when it meant giving up on Quistis?

Quistis, who was still very obviously refusing to look in his direction. Fine. Let her fucking pout if she wanted to. He'd done what he felt was necessary, and fuck her if she just couldn't accept him, the way he'd always known she'd reject him in the end--hadn't he wondered and goddamned wondered what the hell she was doing, loving him of all people?

"How do we kill her?" Seifer demanded again, crossing his arms and standing up, turning his back to her, because as much as he didn't want it to, watching her ignore him hurt.

Especially when they were probably right--Squall was going to kill him the second Seifer's guard slipped for just a moment, and he'd die with three feet of Lionheart through his spine, the same way Rinoa had dangled on the end of Hyperion. He wouldn't blame the guy, but it did significantly shorten his time with Quistis.

"I told you, _I don't know anything_. You were exposed to Ultimecea as much as I was, and you never learned anything very helpful, did you?"

"I wasn't bred to be one of her little bitches." Seifer sneered.

Zell stepped in front of Bria with a scowl.

"Look," Irvine interjected, inserting himself smoothly between Zell and Seifer, "Bria says she doesn't know anything, ok, Almasy? Jest leave the poor kid alone."

"Then how the fuck did she know about what's happening to Quistis?"

The barked question left a hollow silence in its absence, and now even Zell looked slightly uncomfortable, his eyes flickering toward the young woman standing stiffly beside him, looking almost as pale as Quistis.

"You've already tried killing her. It hasn't worked. Maybe there's just nothing you can do. She'll just appear every few years, wreak havoc, a few heroes will happen along to defeat her, she'll fade into obscurity for a while, and then she'll show up again and everything will start all over once more."

"Not good enough." Seifer snapped. "Quistis dies if she doesn't."

Bria stared dully at him. "Ultimicea's been around for a thousand years."

Seifer returned her stare coldly. He didn't give a shit. If he wanted something to bend to his will, it would, even with centuries worth of experience on him. "There has to be some way."

"She'll just take over new hosts. And if she can't find someone good enough to force herself on, she'll grow one."

"Grow one?" Irvine butted in, something akin to recognition flashing across his face.

"Yes. As long as the spiritual aspect of Ultimicea is alive--her soul, whatever you want to call it--she can create a new body, but it takes a lot more energy to do that, and she'll be weakened for a while. She works from a host body she isn't intending to use for very long--unless she has some kind of physical visage, she can't do much."

"So she, what? Forces herself into the nearest poor unsuspecting bastard and then works through them to give herself a new body?" Irvine asked, looking thoughtful. "Why doesn't she just keep that one, if growing herself a new body weakens her so much?"

"There aren't many people genuinely suited to sorceress possession--it takes a strong-willed person to handle it, or she burns them out very quickly and they die, and she's back to square one. Creating her own form gives her the freedom to mold it however she wants, and it will last until the body itself either dies of old age or is killed."

"I've seen something like that. In that structure, out on the water? You remember the one we were spying on from the docks? It's her, gotta' be. There's this water capsule holding what looks like a woman, but without a face, and it looks like parts of her body are still forming--fingers, toes, ya' know." He adjusted his hat and pensively tucked one corner of his upper lip between his teeth.

"So she's weakened." Seifer interrupted rudely. "What the fuck does that mean? Does it mean we can kill her while she's working on a new pair of tits?" he demanded vulgarly.

Bria hesitated. "Maybe."

"What do you mean, maybe? And why the fuck didn't you mention this before?"

She inhaled deeply, glancing toward Quistis' rigid shoulders. "Look, even if you can kill Ultimicea while she's vulnerable, you probably can't save her." She nodded toward Quistis.

"Why the fuck not? If Ultimicea's dead, then she can't feed off Quistis anymore."

"Ultimicea is most vulnerable when she's creating her own body. She does this almost out of nothing, except a starting embryo. From there, she can move it through the growth stages much more quickly than is normal. She's most vulnerable while she's doing this, and she usually burns through a couple of host bodies in the process because the magic is so powerful. There were always extra handmaidens called in to guard her during these 'transfers,' so obviously she's afraid of something."

"I don't see the problem." Seifer interrupted again. "Find the host body, kill that, kill the thing Irvine saw. And the bitch dies."

"Stop interrupting me." Bria said coldly. "One of the reasons Ultimicea is so powerful aside from the fact that she's been around for a long time and has studied a lot of ancient rituals and spells that we don't even have access to anymore, is because about a hundred years ago, she figured out how to use other sorceresses as draw points. She can siphon some of their magic into her. So that's what she's been doing for the last century--feeding off the rest of the bloodline, and then killing them off, so there's no competition to her. She loves power, but she hates competition more, so in the end she tried to eradicate all of the other sorceress bloodlines. She chose to keep Rinoa alive because she already had Adel, and Ultimicea could feed off that. Rinoa was a good candidate because she was obviously capable of surviving sorceress possession, not to mention at Garden she was in a position to access some very powerful people without their knowledge for a while. Once Rinoa died, that'd be the last of the sorceress blood except for her. That's why I transferred to B. Garden--I was supposed to keep an eye on things."

"Good job." Seifer sneered.

"Shut up. She thought she'd killed off everyone, until she discovered recently that Quistis was actually a descendent of one of the bloodlines. I heard rumors that she sent people to kill her."

"Three times." Seifer said impatiently. "I don't want a fucking bedtime story. Get to the fucking point."

"First she tried to destroy her, like with the rest of them, because she thought that since the sorceress abilities hadn't actually manifested themselves in Quistis, she was basically useless. Then she came across research that suggested she could actually feed directly off her life force instead, so when Rinoa's body was destroyed, she needed something else to pull from while she searched for another host, and she began using Quistis."

Bria paused, knotting her hands tightly together and studying her knuckles. "If you just kill the host and the new body, it'll damage her significantly, but…she still has Quistis as a reserve to draw from."

"So what you're saying is that I have to die too." Quitis interposed calmly.

The roaring in Seifer's ears sounded like an entire fucking ocean. He drowned in the sound, died in it, and she was just _standing _there so fucking peacefully, like her entire world hadn't just crashed to splintered pieces somewhere near her feet.

Seifer stood ominously silent for a few moments while Bria and Quistis debated details in the buzzing, unimportant voices of faroff insects, the proverbial calm before the storm. He felt frozen, liquid, murderously warm, and shell-shocked cold.

He stormed out of the room and up the clanging steel staircase before he could hear anymore.

* * *

She found him two hours later, whether because she'd taken that long to seek him out or simply because the factory was huge and she'd hadn't happened upon him until now, he didn't know and didn't much give a shit.

The control room he'd terrorized lay in slashed curlique ribbons of metal and gutted computer monitors, the main bank smashed almost beyond recognition, wearing his paint streaks of blood like he'd dismantled the entire gargantuan thing with his bare hands. Which, coincidentally enough, he had.

He sat now in this tornado junkyard of ruined equipment, Hyperion lying across his outstretched legs, ripped knuckles adding their own haphazardly patterned touch to the tatters of his clothes and the confetti glitter remnants of his temper tantrum, alternately wishing that he hadn't fucked up his one suicide attempt and hating himself for being so fucking pathetic.

When she walked into the room, Seifer didn't even look up.

Quistis stood in front of him for a while waiting for acknowledgement, and got nothing. Finally she lowered herself beside him, arms wrapping loosely around her knees, looking positively fragile, the hunch of her shoulders accentuating how painfully lean she had become, her fingers where they curved over the knobby protrusions of her kneecaps like skeletal reaper's claws.

"This wasn't exactly the outcome I had hoped for. I wish she had told me sooner, but I suppose she was reluctant to smash everyone's hopes. And perhaps Ultimicea still hasn't lost her hold on Bria entirely--you would know how hard that is to break, and now she's just handed us the woman's death." Quistis mused quietly.

He remained stubbornly silent.

"There are still a few things to go over, but we've hammered out most of the details. First, we'll obviously need to locate the host body, which may or may not be kept in the same place as the body she's creating for herself. Probably not, as that would make her too vulnerable to have them both easily accessible in one place, and Bria said she can work over distances. It must be nearby though, because her range is much shorter during transformation because of the drain on her powers. Secondly, we'll need to kill them all at the same time. Irvine and Selphie are assigned to the host once we find it, Bria and Zell to the body she's creating. I'll be accompanying Bria and Zell. All three links have to be severed at the same time, so she has no time to recover or escape, or draw off me. No one is willing to destroy the link between me and Ultimicea, so I'll be…taking care of that." It was the only point at which she faltered slightly--this was not an honorable battlefield death, but a short, brutal ending by her own hand. Blazes of glory had always been Seifer's dream and not hers, but no one but the very desperate or the cruelly suffering can think of taking their own life without some spastic, unbelieving twitch of the mind.

When he'd pressed that pistol beneath his chin and frozen like that, contemplating whether or not he should really pull the trigger, Seifer had considered his options for a long, long time--and in the end, he hadn't really been able to think of a reason for himself to live, so finally, calmly, he'd depressed that smooth curve of steel with every intention of blowing his brains out.

But Quistis wasn't a fugitive with no friends, family, money, or future. Quistis wasn't hunted, hated, or furthering the collective misery of the world simply by existing. Quistis Trepe was young, beautiful, admired, and far too pragmatic to commit suicide.

And he really, really fucking didn't want her to die.

It was the only thing he could think of as he sat there staring at his reflection in Hyperion, listening dimly to her talk blithely about killing herself.

Why the hell did this have to be all about her? Why did it have to come down to _her _of all people? Someone fucking hated him, with the kind of atomic passion that leveled entire planets. It made him want to slay gods, burn cities, destroy the universe in a volatile bid to express just exactly what he thought of the unfairness of it all.

He focused on his shaking hands where they gripped his weapon. And then, suddenly, without warning, the portion of his mind that controlled motor function snapped off and floated away, and his hands were throwing his gun blade across the room without his permission, to strike the far wall with a heavy _clang_. The pealing noise shut Quistis up, and a new voice suddenly filled the room, shifting to coat each nook, each cranny, rippling like river fog across the entire cavernous space.

It took Seifer several moments to realize it was his own animal shriek.

"_No no no no no no no no_!" He spun and yanked Quistis roughly to her feet, holding her tightly by both arms, her startled face inches from his. But this was not the breathless, charged romance of before-kiss tension--this was desperation, rage, and the tinge of insanity the sorceress had planted long ago in his fertile young mind. "Shut the fuck up! _You shut the fuck up_!"

"Seifer, calm down." Quistis said, pitching her voice low, like she was trying to comfort some stupid, wounded beast trying to bite the hand that meant to save it. He was _not _her fucking injured puppy, and she wasn't going to calm him down with the murmur of her soothing tone and a few tentative, gentle touches of her hand.

"_'Calm down'_? _You want me to calm the fuck down_? _You want me to calm the fuck down, Quistis_?" he hollered.

"Seifer, you're hurting me." she said calmly, and he let go, the sudden abrupt release of his hands staggering her a little.

Four long, angry strides brought him to Hyperion. His hand closed around it like the clasp of an old friend, and when he turned, the world had blurred around him into fragmented smudges of vermillion hatred.

Hyperion closed the distance between it and the console's remaining pieces in one smooth, glittering arc. It smashed through components and wires and steel like they were nothing, like they were butter, and somewhere in the still-sane part of his mind, Seifer knew he must be scaring her, that his maniac hacking must be persuading her that she'd been crazy to ever see him as anything other than the fucked-up psychopath he was.

He finished with the console and threw the gun blade again, this time into the other wall, then picked up a handful of damaged machine innards and hurled it as hard as he could after his sailing weapon. He kicked another chunk of computer, sent it skidding into yet another wall, then beat the last standing piece of machinery to glittering rubble with his clenched fists, hitting harder, faster, until he couldn't see through the saline tributaries of sweat that blurred his eyes, until he felt each individual knuckle split and gape in a cadaver's autopsy smile, until one of the bones snapped like kindling and he couldn't breathe anymore.

He leaned his good hand against the wall, gasping, and squeezed his eyes shut, his wheezes echoing like faulty bellows inside his lungs.

She waited until his ragged breathing had finally slowed toward something resembling normalcy before saying anything. "Seifer, I'm sorry it has to be like this. I don't want to die, but there's no other choice. I'm already dying. This way, at least my death can help."

"The bitch is lying." he said hoarsely. "There's something else we can do."

"I don't think so." she said in her logical Quistis Trepe voice, the voice that patiently explained to a failing student why their grades were less than up to par. "It makes perfect sense. And she's got nothing to gain from my death, or Ultimicea's, for that matter. She's going against everything she was raised to do."

"She's lying." Seifer repeated dumbly, because he couldn't think of another argument.

"Seifer." Quistis sighed. "Bria says--going off Irvine's description of what he saw--that we probably have about a month left before Ultimicea is ready to take possession of her new body. We've got a month to get everything into place. Please don't waste it."

* * *

He didn't. That same night, he went after Bria. At blade point, he demanded another solution, another plan, another way out. He threatened her life. He threatened Seth's life. He threatened Zell's life. And when she still gave him nothing, he wanted to slit his own throat out of hopelessness.

Zell tried to break his nose for Seifer's violence toward his girlfriend. He tried to break Zell's neck. When interference from both Bria and Quistis stopped them, Seifer stormed off into a city full of people who wanted him dead, and wondered if he maybe shouldn't just walk in front of a bus.

Quistis found him again, brooding inside of the control tower where she had once thrown the fateful switch that ruined his parade with twin resounding crashes.

He though he'd chosen a good place to tuck himself away in, but apparently she possessed some kind of uncanny radar. Or maybe she'd just followed him as he rampaged his way through the city--he hadn't paid much attention to who noticed him. He just couldn't make himself give a shit.

He was slumped against the ledge of the window staring dully out into Deling City's unblinking starlight of businesses and residences when she pulled herself up the last rung and hopped lightly onto solid ground once more, feeling sorry for himself and imagining the fragile core of Chicken Wuss' vertebrae snapping like his knuckle had in Seifer's strangling hands. "Go away." he snapped.

"You can't keep randomly attacking people and lashing out because you're not getting your way." Quistis snapped right back at him, her tone brittle. It was the kind of taut anger he'd heard in her voice whenever he'd driven her to the edge of her composure during lectures he'd ruined.

"I can do whatever the fuck I want." Seifer snarled. "It's not like killing Chicken Wuss or that stupid bitch would be any great loss for the planet."

"Seifer, this is not Bria's fault."

"She was protecting that stupid cunt, wasn't she?" he hissed, still not facing her.

"And so were you at one point, if you remember. Stop taking your own failures and insecurities out on her." Quitis replied coldly. "She didn't choose Rinoa for Ultimicea, or me, and she certainly didn't choose to make my death the only way out of this whole situation."

Her words resounded in long, skipping echoes inside his head, like gravel clattering around the bottom of a well. What did he say to that? 'I don't know what else to do?' Before, when he threatened someone, they did what he told them to, simple as that. He missed the days of the Disciplinary Committee and the kowtowing and fear of B. Garden's student populace. There, he had been their god, the kind that struck people down with lighting if they didn't watch what they were saying, the feared idol that no one liked but had to bow and scrape to anyway for fear of punishment. Now, what he wanted meant shit.

He wanted Quistis to not kill herself more than he'd ever wanted respect or fear, or his long-awaited SeeD status, and he wanted her to never again look at him with the kind of disgust that had permeated her eyes when he'd killed Rinoa, but those were just as useless as his childhood wishes for his dad to stop hating him--futile and worthless and idiotic, just like he felt right now, waiting to think of something profound that he could tell her.

He had nothing, except some self-loathing and a general hatred for everything that threatened to rip him apart at the seams.

The silence stretched like ancient rubber bands between them, frail and stiff. If she was waiting for him to apologize for his treatment of Bria or Zell, she'd die doing so. Literally, in her case. The irony might have been enough to force a bitter laugh between his lips, if he didn't feel like throwing himself out the window and letting his body shatter on the streets below. It felt like it was doing so anyway, fracturing along the splits of his cracked and numb chest, so what would be the harm in making it official?

Seifer rubbed a hand through his hair, ruining the illusion of hunch-shouldered statue. He ruined everything else, too. He was so fucking pathetic, he couldn't even save her, the one thing in his life that would have been something more than petty bullying and misplaced ambition. And not just that, but he couldn't even do anything to make her remaining time more pleasant--he just went off half-cocked like some nut job, beating up her friends and screaming at her.

He sighed and hung his head. "Just fuck off, Quistis. I mean it. Go back to Chicken Wuss and the rest of them."

"I don't want to."

"No one gives a shit what you want, or else you wouldn't be standing around trying to figure out the best way to fucking _off _yourself." Seifer snapped. "I recommend the classic gun in the mouth--that way you won't have to worry about just making yourself a fucking vegetable if you shoot yourself in the temple and it doesn't kill you. Stabbing is too slow, and not guaranteed, same thing with hanging."

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself." Quistis said frigidly. "And don't take it out on me. I didn't ask for this either. At least look at me while you're talking to me."

He spun around with a pained look, crossing his arms over his chest. "What the fuck do you want me to say?"

"I want you to be a little more receptive to me, since I'll be dying in a few weeks." she replied matter-of-factly.

"So what are you going to do? Fuck me? Get in a last few before you croak?"

"Stop it."

"Stop what? Stop telling the fucking truth? That's what we'll do--we'll fuck a few times, you'll keep telling yourself it's what you want, but then you'll come back to watching me stab Rinoa through the fucking heart, and you'll remember all that disgust and hatred and you'll die hating yourself."

She crossed her own arms, mirroring his stance. Her voice took on a softer edge when she spoke this time. "You think I don't really want you, sub-consciously."

"I _think _you'd rather be with your friends than Garden's little lap dog traitor." he snapped.

"And I think you're being a self-pitying idot, and that you're wasting my time."

Seifer clenched his jaw. "Think whatever the fuck you want, but leave me the hell alone. I just want to fucking go to sleep." _And never wake up. _

"You're staying here?"

"Where else am I going to go? The place is all closed off, and none of this shit probably even works anymore, so it's not like anyone is going to be using it. And climbing up a ladder doesn't exactly put anyone at a tactical advantage. It's not like I can't just cut their head off before they have the chance to even realize who I am."

"It's cold." Quistis pointed out.

"I'll live." he said rudely. "Trabia was a lot fucking colder than this."

"Fine." she sighed after a long staredown between them.

* * *

He thought he'd won until, three hours later, he jerked out of fitful sleep to snap bleary eyes open to the sight of the ladder vibrating beneath ascending weight.

He almost killed her, and had to reverse his swing at the last moment, throwing himself off balance and almost landing on his ass from the sudden shift in weight as her blonde head crested the shadowy wrungs and she pulled herself into the small room, hauling a pillow and tidy stack of blankets after.

"What the _fuck _are you doing?" Seifer snapped as he waited for his heart to slowly creep its back back down from his throat, sliding like uncooked meat down into the empty cavity of his chest. "I almost fucking stabbed you!"

She narrowed her eyes at him behind her glasses. "Maybe you should have listened to my lectures on identifying your target before attacking." Quistis suggested crisply. She began to spread everything out into a makeshift bed.

"What are you doing?" he demanded again, setting Hyperion down and scowling.

"I already explained to you who I preferred to spend my time with. Besides, Irvine and Selphie and Bria and Zell are all probably…busy right now. And I have as much right to be here as you do, so if you don't like it, I don't care."

"You're an idiot." Seifer hissed.

"And so are you." Quistis shot back. She rolled herself into the blankets, carefully removed her glasses, folded and set them aside, then closed her eyes. "You're too stubborn, Seifer. You were that way as a student, too. It's why you never became SeeD, because you always thought you knew better than everyone else."

He waited until he thought she must be asleep before summoning enough courage to reply. The gasoline burn in his throat stripped it raw as he forced words up it and between his lips. "I'm _not _always right, because if I were, there'd be another fucking answer, and I'd get to save you. That's what I was trying to do when I killed Rinoa, that's _all _I fucking want to do." He reached out very tentatively, and touched her hair with just the tips of his fingers. "I love you a lot, Instructor, and I don't fucking know why, but I do, and I want all the gay shit that Rinoa and Squall had. I mean, not the stupid pet names and shit like that, but I want you to just fucking look at me like she used to look at him. Like _you _used to look at him." He broke his soliloquy with a scowl. "What the hell is it with him, anyway? It's like the sun shines out of his fucking ass." He knotted his hands between his knees, letting go of the shining warmth of her head with a painful lurch of his heart.

"Seifer." His name was just a sigh, but he jumped anyway. "Please just get inside. It's cold--your voice is shaking."

_Not because it's cold. _he thought, swallowing bile. "What are you going to say to all of that?" he ordered. "I thought you were asleep, by the way. So thanks for letting me make a jackass out of myself."

"You've done that plenty of times before, and it never seemed to bother you." He heard the smile in her voice, and scowled harder.

"If you're friends with Chicken Wuss, than that obviously appeals to you." he muttered spitefully.

"I don't have anything to say." Quistis told him truthfully. "I think my being here despite how rude and downright nasty you've been says everything more eloquently than I could myself. Seifer, I wouldn't be here freezing half to death when I could be in a hotel room taking a relaxing bath if I didn't want to spend what time I've got left with you. And I wouldn't want to spend what time I've got left with you if I didn't love you. A lot. I don't know why either, but does it really matter? If my studies have shown me anything over the years, it's that battle tactics and training drills and classroom lectures are logical and planned and explainable--love isn't."

"Your 'studies'? Is this a fucking research project?"

"All right, my 'observations' if that makes you feel better."

He sat silently, brooding over that for a minute or two. "I'm a huge asshole."

"Yes, I'm aware of that." she said patiently.

"I honestly don't really give a shit about people as a whole. They're fucking worthless, if you ask me. I don't give a shit about helping them. I think the planet would be better off if most of them died."

"I know."

"I killed Rinoa." His voice hiccupped a little on the last admission, and he reined in his burgeoning emotions with as much force as he could muster. "And you still love me?"

"Yes." Quistis assured him quietly.

He felt his chest expand a little; it was a bitter, euphoric, agonizing sensation, and it made him want to kiss her the way he'd seen Squall kiss Rinoa--tenderly, without any awareness of the existence of anyone else, like the whole planet had just contracted to that one pinpoint of gentle lips and the warm contentment of first love emotions.

It made him want to vomit when he remembered how quickly that would all end.

He crawled in next to her and slid onto his side, pressing himself against her back in a concave spoon of chest heat and warm breath. She rolled to face him, and it struck him again just how sickly she looked--she was so fucking pale, it felt like he was already looking at her ghost, like she was just brittle bone dust laid over the dips and curves of Quistis Trepe's decaying corpse, and when he touched her she would vanish in one phantom puff of vanishing apparition.

She smiled at him, and he cautiously ran a finger down one of her hollow cheeks.

When she fell asleep minutes later, her lips held the curve of that smile, and he held that image into the ephemeral black of slumber.


	27. Chapter 26

**A/N: Well, I got a few requests to post the ending, and though there weren't many, at least a few of you are still interested. I didn't need 300 reviews, just enough to know that it was worth posting the final couple of chapters. And to the reviewer who said that my decision was 'rude and selfish,' you'd probably be better off not coming across so aggressively if you want something from someone. There wasn't anything rude or selfish behind my decision, it was simple logic--I can finish the fic, keep it to myself, and only know what I think. Or I can post, get no reviews...and only know what I think. Why bother with the last step in that case? Anyway, this frickin' note is getting about as long as the chapter itself...thanks to those of you who did review to let me know you'd like to read the ending, and just to let everyone know, we're down to the very end just about. After this, there will be one more chapter and then that's it. I'm sad to see this end, but at least I can concentrate on my original fiction now. **

**Chapter Twenty Six**

Control Tower

Deling City

Quistis woke to Seifer's head on her shoulder, and the crystal-faceted string of his drool, a sharp diamond contrast against early-morning dawn. She smiled, until her sleep-fuzzed eyesight cleared slightly, and she realized it was slowly getting closer, fanned by the alternating breeze of his exhalations.

Despite her distaste, Quistis had to wonder if the world could hate him quite so passionately as before, with this image of tired, drooling little boy fresh in their minds--he looked…not so much innocent, because that was never a description she could really associate with Seifer, just…peaceful. Restful, without the weight of the world straining its massive load against his stubborn shoulders. The crescent shadows of his eyelashes stained his cheekbones in downy slashes of onyx thread, darker than the sky as it brightened gradually around their twisted cocoon into shades of cotton candy pink and vibrant peach.

She pushed his face gently away, earning a derisive snort of protest from him and another wistful smile from her, and watched the sun force its way through lingering storm clouds.

Bars of crimson stabbed down into their dusty, forgotten sanctuary, reflecting in solar ruby flares off her glasses where they lay on the floor. The invading light collected in a nebulous halo around Seifer's blonde head, softened into blurred crayon smudges by the filter of gunmetal cloud banks.

When he finally opened his eyes, they fluttered ponderously in luxurious little gradations of returning conciousness. His green eyes narrowed three inches away from her face, and his prepatory inhalation sucked the cord of saliva back into his mouth.

He choked on it.

Quistis laughed as he rolled away from her, coughing and cussing, his revolution ripping most of the blankets off her and leaving her skinny frame shivering in the morning's brisk chill.

Seifer pulled himself onto hands and knees, shooting a glare out of his peripheral vision. "Ha ha. That was fucking hilarious."

"It was an interesting way to start the day, at least."

He roughly threw the blankets back down on top of her, and stretched, his muscles shifting powerfully beneath his shirt.

Then, abruptly, he was on his knees beside her, looking uncharacteristically earnest, the tousled points of his sleep-disturbed hair catching rays of sunlight in fuchsia peaks that burned her eyes.

She frowned a question up at him. "Seifer…?"

"I can find some other way to kill her."

Quistis sighed. _You can't solve everything with brute force. _But deep down Seifer would never accept that, so she said nothing.

Instead, she sat up and kissed him. His arms came around her back and jerked, smashing her up against his chest, and suddenly she'd started something much more fervent than she'd originally intended. His touch was desperation, a long good-bye even if he couldn't accept it for what it really was, and his arms held her a little too tightly, his lips pushing a little too fiercely against hers.

Quistis let him lay her back down on their snarled bed of covers, and what followed was frenzied, rough, and brief. He remembered halfway through that this wasn't the same athletic soldier he'd bedded a couple of months ago, and stopped guiltily, until she shook her head and dug her nails into his naked back.

When they finished, Seifer kissed her sweaty forehead and pulled out, then laid his prickly cheek down on her breasts.

She pushed a few damp strands of hair from his temples and rested her hand on top of his head, listening to the reassuring thump of his slowing heartbeat.

When he began to dress, she watched him quietly, observing the flex and release of his sturdy muscles, the way the new morning gilded him in sunrise fire, and the jade focus of his eyes as they regarded her severely.

_It's going to be all right. _Quistis thought, smiling peacefully and closing her eyes. It wasn't…but, oddly, the composure in her smile echoed throughout the rest of her, and she realized that if she didn't like the direction her life was heading, at least she felt…prepared. It was strange thinking of an existence without Seifer now, but that too was just a distant ache. Perhaps it was the methodical purpose her death would hold--while the situation itself had slipped through her controlling fingers, her actions would be the adhesive pinning their final battle together, and even if the thought of suicide sickened her, she could hold onto the fact that at least her death would be under her own power, and not left to the whims of some overly-ambitious sorceress.

Seifer would stop loving her eventually, and move on to other women, other objectives--he was nothing if not driven, and his sense of greatness would propel him toward some other grand aspiration once she was gone. Whether that aspiration would save the world or destroy it, she didn't know, but whatever it ended up being, the world would remember for a long time.

* * *

"I'm obviously not asking the right question."

His voice made her jump as she emerged from the bathroom, the towel Bria clutched around her breasts slipping dangerously. She hiked it back up as Seifer pushed himself off the wall he'd been leaning against and automatically retreated a few steps, an instinctive response to the hostility in his eyes.

He smiled humorlessly and tapped Hyperion casually against a gloved hand. "Chicken Wuss isn't here to save you this time, so I thought it might be a good time for us to talk."

He set his gun blade casually down on the bed and crossed his arms. He was going to try very hard not to kill this bitch, because in the end he would probably need her, but there was no telling what kind of limits this conversation would drive him past, and he never had been very good at restraint. Wasn't that why Quistis had constantly berated him in class? _"You need more restraint, Cadet Almasy. Aggression can be helpful on the battlefield, but it can also be detrimental. Some situations need to be thought out. You can't always go charging in to save the day." _

And how had he always replied to that particular reprimand? _"I'm the best fighter Garden's ever seen, Instructor. If I go charging in, we win, period." _

If only it was that fucking simple.

"Seifer, just leave me alone. I'm sorry Quistis has to die, I really am, ok? I understand how you feel."

Trust the moron to kick the conversation off with the most rage-inducing topic she could think of. "_No_, you fucking don't know how I feel. Don't fucking tell me that again, or I'll slit your throat." he snarled, and something in his eyes told her that threat was the absolute truth, because she shut her mouth and perched gingerly on the corner of the bed, looking frightened and vaguely frustrated.

He swallowed heavily. "Is there some way to sever the link between Ultimecia and Quistis? _Without _killing Quistis?"

Bria pursed her lips, the fright disappearing in place of thoughtfulness. "Not that I'm aware of, or else I would have suggested something else. I mean, Ultimecia should just be able to keep using her as a draw point, unless Quistis dies, obviously."

"What if she chooses to stop using Quistis?"

Bria's forehead rippled into baffled lines. "She wouldn't. Not when she has a source of power readily available to her."

"But if she did, if she cut off contact between her and Quistis completely, could she ever open the link between them again, or would Quistis be safe?"

"I guess…well, when you destroy a draw point, you can't use it ever again. It's gone permanently. I would imagine someone as powerful as Ultimecia could destroy a draw point, she's just never done it before--there hasn't been any reason for her to do so. And she won't do it now, Seifer."

He could feel his heartbeat like molten thunder in his chest, uncomfortably hot and over-sized. He'd never felt more fucking terrified in his entire life.

"Would destroying the draw point kill Quistis?"

"I don't see why it would."

"And if the draw point is destroyed, than the bitch can be killed if the host body and the one she's creating are killed at the same time, because she'll be weak, with nothing left to draw off and nowhere to go, right?"

Bria nodded. "Yeah. But that link between Ultimecia and Quistis has to be dead. There's no other way, not that I know of at least."

Seifer nodded, rolling the pad of his thumb across one shaking palm where it nestled beneath his armpit. "Ok." he said, and picked up Hyperion. "…Thanks. You're pretty much a useless bitch, and you're dating Chicken Wuss, so obviously there's something seriously fucked up about you, but that was…helpful, I guess."

She scowled at him. "Gee, thanks, you stupid asshole. _Zell's _right about you."

Seifer rolled his eyes. "Don't let Chicken Wuss' secret fag fantasies sway you about my charming personality." He smirked and saluted her with Hyperion. "I'm pretty much a joy to be around."

And then he left, ignoring the 'Seifer, what are you going to do?' that she called after him, the white-knuckled knobs of his fingers where they clutched his weapon like the lifeline it was twitching spastically.

What was he going to do? What he was destined to do, he supposed.

He hoped Quistis would understand in the end.

* * *

Deling General Hospital

Deling City

Irvine was apprehensive about allowing Seifer to tag along, to say the least. The man wasn't exactly prone to following orders, and the term 'playing well with others' was not even a small-print footnote at the end of his no doubt extremely short dictionary.

So it was a close eye he kept on Quistis' surprising romantic interest when he insisted on accompanying the sniper and his girlfriend on their mission of tracking down the sorceress' host body, an assignment that left a bad taste in his mouth as it was, even without the addition of Garden's most notorious failure.

The parameters of this mission were the vaguest of any he'd ever embarked on--as a mercenary, he was given a target, ordered to eliminate it, and that was that. The 'where', 'when', and 'who' were tidily outlined, like a teacher's neatly-penned essay challenge, though the 'why' was sometimes a bit fuzzy--but he could deal with that, as sometimes you were better off not knowing why you were killing some stranger anyway. This, though, this was a 'who' without any accompanying details, and how was he to go about tracking down some thousand-year-old woman inhabiting a body that wasn't hers, a body he hadn't a clue as to appearance, age, or location?

And if he did succeed, then it meant the end for Quistis, and he didn't quite feel like dealing with that idea yet.

Bria's best guess was that the host would be somewhere within the limits of the city. Ultimecia needed to be relatively near the creature Irvine and Squall had discovered in the half-finished palace that he guessed was to be Ultimecia's home once she was fully resurrected. Beyond that, she hadn't a clue as to where they should begin.

Seifer's suggestion was the best starting point--checking hospital records for an unusual number of coma patients who died soon after the onset of their comatose state.

And that was how he found himself playing the distraught 'friend' of an auto accident victim, the brutality of which had sent his childhood buddy into a coma, and no, he didn't have any details beyond that, except for a false name he gave to the triage nurse at the front desk. The name, of course, pulled up no records. Irvine hysterically suggested that maybe his friend hadn't had any identification on her at the time--she'd been the passenger, not the driver--and wondered aloud if there were any 'Jane Does' checked into the hospital.

He drummed his fingers tensely on the countertop, glancing at Selphie out of the corner of his eye, who was lounging in a badly-upholstered chair, reading a magazine from a stack on the table next to her.

He prayed Seifer was behaving himself in his hiding spot inside the vehicle Irvine had 'borrowed' from a busy salon parking lot earlier that morning. He'd specifically chosen something non-descript and switched plates with another car in the hopes of confusing authorities for the length of time it took him to use and then ditch the vehicle, and it was there that Seifer and his famously unpopular face waited.

Or probably not. When had Seifer Almasy ever sat around patiently killing time before the action kicked off? He was the instigator, not the obedient little lookout who would let others know from the safety of his watch tower that the battle had begun.

Irvine turned and raised an eyebrow at Selphie, who looked up and smiled sunnily at him. He nodded his head toward the parking lot. She set her magazine down with a scowl that wrinkled her perkily attractive features, and stood up, catching his meaning. He'd thought of just leaving her with Seifer in the first place, but he didn't quite trust Almasy to not do something stupid, and he didn't like the thought of leaving Selphie alone with him. Not to mention, if he wanted to leave, he'd leave, a determined little brown-haired girl in a pink sundress be damned.

He felt sick--he should have sent Selphie to ask about coma patients and stayed with Seifer himself. But honestly, he'd probably be just as ineffective in stopping him as Selphie--hadn't Seifer proved that numerous times during the Second Sorceress War? Mildly out of his mind in the best of times, hooked to Ultimecia's leash he'd been pretty much unstoppable. It had taken all of their cunning and their strength to finally take him down--and this time it was just Irvine and Selphie against his skills and his brutal strength.

Nervously, Irvine turned as the doors behind him whooshed open to admit Selphie once more. She nodded subtly to him and skipped back to her chair.

"We don't have any coma patients under that name, and no Jane Does either." the triage nurse informed him.

"Any coma patients at all?" Irvine asked desperately, taking his hat off and wringing it dramatically between his hands, his earnest eyes softening the woman's weary visage.

She shook her head and smiled sadly at him. "I'm sorry, but it doesn't look like it."

"Thank you anyway, ma'am." he said gravely, collecting Selphie on his way out the door.

Their next few stops proved fruitless as well, and though Seifer was fairly cooperative for Seifer, he did his best to make things unpleasant to say the least, making snide comments about Irvine's driving abilities, his sexuality, and his taste in women. Selphie declared him a 'meanie' more times than Irvine could count, and the normally even-tempered cowboy threatened to shove him out of the moving car more than once.

By the time they finally decided to call it quits, he was two gay remarks away from killing Seifer and dumping his body on the side of the road.

He dropped Selphie off at their hotel, accepted a kiss from her before she flounced off up the sidewalk waving happily to passerbys, then shifted the car into drive and smoothly re-entered traffic.

"You two are disgusting, you know." Seifer observed nonchalantly, propping his boots on the center console between the driver and front passenger seats. "Aren't you supposed to be fugitives from the fucking law or something? That fucking thing she's wearing is so bright it's probably even pissing off that guy." he said, pointing to a man across the street wearing dark glasses and carrying a white cane.

Irvine rolled his eyes.

"What do you see in her anyway? She's one of the most annoying people I've ever met, and her tits are probably only an A cup, if that."

Irvine clenched his jaw, deciding to ignore the blatant proof that this jerk had been looking at his girlfriend's breasts. "She's a good person."

Seifer blinked dully at him in the rearview mirror. "I'd cut off my own arm and ass rape myself with it if it would make her stop talking."

"Well _you're _not dating her, so why should it matter to you? Keep your head down--people know who you are, you know."

"They know who you are too." Seifer pointed out.

"I'm not a wanted terrorist. And really, it's only the occupying soldiers we need to be watching for, not regular citizens who are probably just as fed up with the military occupation."

Seifer laced his hands behind his head. "So what do you see in her?"

Irvine frowned and checked the rearview mirror as he signaled and pulled into the carpool lane, careful not to draw any unwanted attention to himself. "What's it matter, Almasy?"

"I mean, can she put her leg behind her head or something, because that's the only reason I can see for not just fucking her and then never calling again."

Irvine's jaw and hands tightened simultaneously, the latter creaking the steering wheel dangerously between them, the ashen bands of finger that wrapped its cracked leather sphere shining like lighthouse beacons in the approaching dusk that filled the vehicle. "I date her because I love her, man, not that it's any of your business. You don't know her."

Seifer rapped the back of Irvine's chair with one foot, jarring the sniper's knees forward against the lower half of the steering column. "Stop it!" he snapped, his voice like the fading whip crack of Quistis' expertly-brandished weapon. How in the hell had she ever dealt with this man as her student without personally beating his face in with the heavy base of her classroom projector? She was quite obviously a far better person than he'd suspected, and that acknowledgement yanked him away from thoughts of veering into oncoming traffic and ending forever the snide chatter issuing from the backseat. _Dammit, Quistis. _he thought, his chest vising shut around the hole that ached like the fatal gunshot wound of a slowly dying man.

He'd known going into this life that it wasn't without its risks, right? He'd known very well the possibilities of lost friends and crippling disfiguration and death, with nothing more to show for it than enough gil in his account to buy himself something nice whenever depression set in.

Detachment was a soldier's true friend, but who could really sustain that anyway? Even Squall's barriers had crumbled in random mortar sections of falling restraints eventually.

His eyes flicked toward the rearview mirror once again, focusing on the pink trench mark of his passenger's forehead scar, the fierce skewer of his glare…and the tension in his sullen face.

Even Seifer's emotional ramparts had come down. Funny it had been a woman to accomplish what others wouldn't in a thousand years with these two men who were probably more alike than they wanted to admit. It was why Irvine personally loved the gender--they possessed powers beyond that of any other creature in existence. And, being a young man, in all gentlemanly honesty he felt obliged to admit that he really, really liked boobs.

The tightness in his chest coiled in on itself a little more rigidly.

Despite homosexual jibes, nasty comments about Selphie and the fact that he'd killed Rinoa for no viable reason at all in the end, for all it had accomplished, somehow, Irvine just couldn't let himself hate the man. 'Like' was certainly not an adjective he'd use to describe his feelings toward Seifer, but neither was 'loathing.' Hatred was exhausting after a while. Sooner or later, you just had to let go before it ate away your humanity.

"Why are you here, Almasy?" he asked quietly.

Seifer lifted an eyebrow. "I opened the door, got in, realized that was a huge fucking mistake when I found out how much the little messenger girl can talk, and I've been stuck here ever since. I'd get out, but you know, I don't think anybody here wants to be my friend. Not that ditching from the car at this speed would hurt." He smirked nastily. "You know, I've seen eighty-year-old half-blind women drive faster than this. I've seen Chicken Wuss _think _faster. What the fuck's your problem, anyway? Don't you have to get home to your boyfriend or something?"

Irvine decided to very maturely ignore all that. "I'm talkin' about why you're helpin' us bring this all to an end, when finding the host body is gonna' mean Quistis dyin'."

Seifer's tightening eyebrows folded his scar down the center. "Quistis can do whatever the hell she wants." He scowled and looked away.

Irvine rubbed at the tension forming between his eyebrows. "Look, man, I know you care about her. I do too. She's one of my best friends, and I don't…I don't like this either." _To severely understate things. _"So if you need…to talk or somethin'…" He knew it was a bad idea before he even completed the thought aloud, but there was nothing more to do now then let it hang there.

Seifer met his eyes blankly in the mirror. "Are you hitting on me?"

"No, dammit! I like _women_."

Garden's traitor smirked and dropped his hands, folding both arms over his chest. "Maybe you should cut your hair. Might clear up some misconceptions."

He thought for one just-step-off-the-damn-cliff moment that maybe he could spill his guts to this man he actually respected more than the cowboy would ever know--that maybe this could be some defining moment of his life where someone would give him the kind of recognition he would deserve for this grand plan with all its noble intentions and heroic selflessness and simplistic brilliance.

It would go down in history books--let this man's grudging respect be the first review of Seifer Almasy's final performance. After all, it wasn't like he could hang around afterward to enjoy his handiwork.

But Irvine Kinneas was just as much a phony as Seifer, hiding behind his malicious comments and his barbed insults and his not-so-thinly-veiled contempt for everyone who wasn't him. Sure, that bleached-white smile had probably dropped a few pairs of pants along the way, but chicks were fucking moronic like that, and Seifer wasn't some awe-struck virgin about to let the school lothario pop her cherry. Underneath the charming exterior, the sharpshooter was just a regular guy with an exasperating girlfriend like thousands of men around the country, excluding the fact that he could shoot the eye out of a piece of currency from over a mile away. Behind the twinkling magnetism of his pretty little girl eyes, he was a goody-goody who might try and stop him, or worse yet, inform Quistis what her former student was planning.

Squall would understand. For all the thousand-mile stick jammed up his ass, he knew sacrifice, and he knew how to give up everything for one woman. Maybe he wouldn't have gone out with quite the bang that Seifer intended, but he'd have died a million times for Rinoa if Seifer hadn't taken her away too soon.

So he said nothing, and spent the rest of the trip staring out the window, watching the onset creep of nighttime and wondering if he would burn the entire world this time.

* * *

When Bria left for a sojourn with the girls in the early evening hours to participate in activities like assisted bathing, naked pillow fights that would degenerate into sweaty wrestling matches, and the kind of inappropriate conduct Garden had frowned upon, (or so Zell assumed,) he fully intended on overdosing on rented porn and taking care of…manly needs.

Reality found him watching a tragic canine movie involving gallant sacrifice for a beloved owner, thinking about Quistis, and bawling his eyes out.

They were not the masculine sniffles of manfully-contained almost-sobs, but the full-blown, high-pitched wails of a small girl crying over the dead pet bird she'd accidentally drowned in the toilet during an attempted bath. He felt nauseated, bloated, and dehydrated as he sat amidst his scattered tubs of empty ice cream containers, smeared in the Neapolitan streaks of their long-gone contents.

It was hard not to draw parallels between his friend and the brave dog currently dying in his master's arms, though to her credit--barring any unknown shaving habits--Quistis was much less hairy than Duke. And just like the teary-eyed man cradling his beloved companion, Zell felt the solid left jab of helplessness square in his solar plexus as his friend slipped away from him like words off a water-soaked page, blurring into ruined streaks of fading black the same way her life was gradually fading from view like an aged watercolor.

"Don't just sit there!" he wailed, blowing his nose loudly and dabbing at his streaming eyes. "Do something, man! He just stepped on a mine for you!" Zell screamed, fresh tears burning crimson tracks down his blotchy cheeks.

Someone knocked at his hotel door.

He scrambled for the remote, flipped channels quickly without paying attention to what the picture screen switched to, and froze inside the circular nest of wadded-up tissues he'd built for himself over the past hour.

The same fist landed again, three steady blows, harder than the first, and too insistent to just ignore.

Crap. It had to be Bria home early--and she'd left her key copy on the small corner table holding an ugly, oversized lamp that he'd already knocked over once. He could see it from here, glinting accusingly at him.

"Um, just a minute!" Zell called out in the gruffest bass he could manage, launching himself off the bed, misjudging the power behind his springboard leap and crashing into one of the walls. He picked himself up, ran to the bathroom sink, frantically splashed copious amounts of water across his mottled features, and then dashed back toward the door.

He smiled widely as he opened the door, the expression vanishing rapidly when Seifer's sneering face greeted him instead. The larger man forced his way inside, slamming the door behind him, strutting inside like he owned the place.

"Hey!" Zell protested, grabbing for Seifer's elbow and missing.

"What the fuck's wrong with your face, Wuss? Aside from the obvious, of course."

"It tried to escape when it saw you and I had to fight it back into place!" Zell retaliated, feeling rather proud of himself for that one. "What the hell are you doing here, assface? You're lucky I don't kill you!"

Seifer snorted and turned back to look scornfully down on the clench-fisted martial artist. "If you can take me one day, Wuss, I'll let that pony tailed freak stick it in my ass--what's his name again?" He cupped his chin thoughtfully in his hand.

"_Irvine_!" Zell growled. The asshole _knew _that.

"Where's the only pair of tits you'll ever see in your life unless you pay for them?"

"Bria's not here." He scowled. "What do _you _want with her, dickhead?"

"I can _see _that she's not here, Wuss, unless you chopped up her fucking body and stuck it under the bed. She tried to leave you, didn't she?" He smirked.

"No! She's out with Quistis and Selphie."

Seifer's eyes narrowed. "Doing what?"

"Dunno." Zell shrugged. "Girl stuff." he elaborated, flashing back for just a moment to images of beautifully bouncing breasts, strategically-placed feathers and lots of coy touching that would lead to other, not-so-coy touching…

Seifer scooped the remote off the bed and aimed it at the television set. "What the hell were you watching earlier?"

Two men doing…enthusiastic things to each other without any clothes on flashed across the twenty-inch screen, and Zell's jaw dropped. "Dude, I swear I wasn't watching that! I wasn't _watching that_!" he insisted, diving toward the device in Seifer's hand, forced to chase it a little as the other man burst into raucous laughter, the slender object bobbing and weaving in his shaking grip.

"Fuck me! I was just kidding about all the fag comments I've made about you, Wuss." Seifer told him amiably. "Mostly. But I guess deep down we just somehow know, don't we?"

"Get out!" Zell hollered, impressively red-faced as he snapped the TV off.

"I need to talk to Bria again. I was wondering if she'd like to know what it's like to be with a real man."

Zell charged him; Seifer flipped out a hand almost casually as the other man reached him, the back of his fist rebounding off Zell's forehead. The sudden reversal of motion stumbled Zell three feet backward, where he crashed with a yelped curse into the window, taking the curtain with him.

Seifer crouched down next to him. "Look, Wuss, I'm actually not here to start a fight for once. I just need a favor."

"From Bria? Why the hell would she help you?"

Seifer frowned. "She's into all the girly romantic wuss shit, isn't she?"

Zell blinked dumbly at him for a moment. 'Girly romantic wuss shit'…? What the hell was Seifer talking about? His hatred momentarily burned away, replaced by the knot of confusion that balled itself into a hard lump in the center of his chest. "Uh…I guess. I mean, she doesn't like it when I recite poetry to her, but--"

"Because nobody wants to sit through 'Roses are red, uhhh, daffodils are yellow, right?--your face makes me mellow, and when I think about you, I need to go poo.'"

"Hey, it's never been _that _bad!" Zell protested. (There had, of course, been that one haiku involving a few misspelled words that led to vast amounts of confusion as to why he was complimenting the 'sparkling grape juice beauty' of his girlfriend's 'pyes,' but he wasn't going to mention that.) "Besides, _you _come up with something good off the top of your head." He untangled himself from the drape's tattered hem and stood up, dusting himself off. You think the maids would forsee the need to clean that thing once in a while…

"Roses are red, get in my bed, I'll fuck you rough, if you eat another girl's muff." Seifer recited, then threw back his head and laughed.

It was almost enough for Zell to forget that he despised the man, but nothing could quite make him lose that important detail. So mentally storing that one away for later (he could always tell Irvine he'd thought of it himself,) Zell folded his arms tightly and glared up at the still-chuckling traitor. "Why the hell do you need Bria?" he asked again.

Seifer sobered instantly. "I want to take Quistis to a nice dinner or something. You know, the kind of gay shit you do. Except that I'm gonna' get laid afterward." He winked lewdly at Zell, who puffed up instantly, ready to defend his friend's honor. She'd been entirely too correct when she'd told him that she knew he could never understand what she felt for Seifer. The guy was like AIDS, except worse--he was a new strain of the disease that could be contracted merely by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, always fatal and agonizingly slow about it.

"Relax, Wuss, all right? We've just never been on a date before."

"Uh, your timing kind of, you know, sucks the way you did to pass your classes." Zell pointed out, scratching his head. "You can't just take her out someplace nice, you know. You'll get mobbed. Probably stabbed to death with forks, or maybe the waiters could beat your face in with their trays until the police came to arrest you." he suggested cheerfully.

"I don't mean take her _out _somewhere, you idiot. That's why I need Bria. I can't exactly go shopping for a bunch of nice shit, can I? And I can't take Quistis anywhere, so I need her to pick up a few things for me. Just maybe some deli stuff and some alcohol. Messenger Girl is so cold to me my balls run for cover. Your girlfriend hates me, but at least she'll acknowledge me. And it's for Quistis, not me, and the whole impending doom thing is partly her fault, so she fucking owes her."

"It's not Bria's fault. And you're going to woo Quistis with deli food and alcohol? Dude, do you remember all the Trepies? You need something a lot fancier than that."

"What the hell would you suggest, Chicken Wuss? Filet mignon and that fruity shit they serve with pink umbrellas?"

---

She walked in three hours later through the unlocked door to the most astonishing sight she would probably witness in her entire life--her boyfriend and his longtime tormentor leaning brightly colored heads over a scrap of notebook paper Zell pinned to the bed with one hand, debating the merits of roses versus tiger lilies.

Seifer's opinion on both was characteristically simple, and brutal. "Look, Wuss, flowers are pussy. Period. I'm not going there."

"Girls _like _flowers, Alm_ass_y. I know what I'm talking about. Roses are too overdone--Quistis needs something pretty, but not too girly."

"This coming from the same Chicken Wuss who used to hide in the girl's locker room and try to pretend he was one of the benches? You don't know shit about women."

"Give me a break, I was thirteen!"

It was clear the conversation had been going along in this vein for some time. Bria dropped the loaded shopping bag she carried in one hand (Selphie's definition of 'window shopping' was apparently much different than any she'd ever encountered before) just inside the door and shut it behind her, taking a moment to orient herself.

Zell was speaking, with Seifer. Without either of their hands around the other's throat, and while the dialogue wasn't exactly loving, it didn't seem quite as hostile as she'd come to expect.

Another argument--over alcoholic beverages this time--broke out, resulting in a slap upside the head from Seifer, and a subsequent punch from Zell that he landed on the other man's cheek, just a glancing blow, but enough to prompt a whole new riotous stream of curses.

Well, they weren't killing each other at least. That was certainly…new.

"What the hell are you two doing?"

Zell smiled at her; Seifer's brow creased into irritated undulations. "Trying to understand women." he barked at her, glaring. "Let me know when one comes by, ok? I've got a few questions."

She rolled her eyes, and thought vaguely about kicking him out for a moment before discarding that idea. Unless she could kill him and drag his body out into the hallway, he'd stay until he felt ready to leave at his own leisure. Seifer was one of those men who did everything at his own leisure, no matter how much it screwed everyone else over.

He came to his feet suddenly as she rounded the bed, and automatically, Bria stepped back--it never ceased to amaze her that Quistis, all 5'6" and one hundred fifteen pounds of her, managed to stand up to this…sociopath. To be frank, he scared the crap out of her, the furious attempts he'd made on her life notwithstanding. It was his eyes--some people lied with clever shifts of the gaze, with the theatrical little nuances of accomplished fibbers, but Seifer's always told you exactly what was going to happen next. When he'd threatened to slit her throat, green iris showed him doing just that. It was more frightening than the empty well stare of a prolific serial killer, the gaze that tells you nothing about capability--maybe nothing, maybe everything.

Seifer's eyes exhibited his potential for anything. They were the eyes of a man who burned worlds just because, the eyes of a man who might literally rip your heart out and eat it, just because he had said he would and he didn't like backing down.

"Violins!" Zell screamed abruptly, shooting upward like a fair-haired jack-in-the-box. "Thirty different violins, all playing her favorite song, and a plane in the background, skywriting poetry!"

"Where the hell would we put all that, how in the hell would I pay for it, and what in the _fuck _makes you think I would even consider anything like that?"

"You're gonna' need all the help you can get." Zell pointed out.

Bria frowned. "Again: what is going on? Someone answer me this time."

"Seifer is trying to have a date with Quistis. And he wanted to serve ham sandwiches and beer, _so_, as an expert on the subject of women, I'm guiding him. For the sake of Quistis, not him." he quickly amended.

"_You're _teaching Seifer everything he needs to know about women?" Bria demanded.

Her boyfriend looked confused, like he couldn't quite figure out the incredulous weight dangling from her words. "Yeah."

Bria turned toward Seifer, who looked a little ridiculous with Zell's cartoonish sketch of several different varieties of flowers crumpling in his rough hand.

But his face was still menacing enough as he tossed the drawing aside, so she skirted around him when she switched directions to head into the bathroom. She left the door open as she washed her hands, and felt his eyes boring into her. "Can I help you?" She said it in a deliberately nonchalant tone, because if her brief exposure to Seifer had taught her one thing, it was that dealing with him wasn't unlike taking on a hungry, desperate animal--show one sign of fear, and he would rip out your throat.

He looked away when she tried to meet his gaze, and frowned.

Maybe there was something brewing here. As casually as she could, Bria smiled at Zell and asked him to get her something from the vending machine on the first floor. "I'm really craving one of those Chocobo Chunk bars right now." She wasn't, actually--the misshapen lumps of chocolate, frankly speaking, reminded her of animal feces, and she never really had managed to come to terms with the name without imagining fluffy yellow birds fleeing in terror from chainsaw-wielding maniacs. But it would get rid of Zell for a few moments--especially considering that she'd noticed on her way in that the machine was broken. "Please, Zell. I've got cramps right now. That's the only thing that will help them."

He looked reluctant to leave her alone with Seifer, but more terrified at the prospect of dealing with womanly issues.

"I'll be all right. I promise." she insisted firmly, pushing him toward the door. "Oh Hyne, I feel a mood swing coming on--it's a bad one this time--"

Zell disappeared frantically out into the hall. .

Seifer crossed his arms and smirked. "He's so fucking stupid--why do you date him?"

Bria sighed. "Look, I'll fully admit Zell is not the sharpest tool in the box, but he's not a complete idiot. And he's amusing, to say the least. And his intentions are always good. And he's…" She paused, narrowing her eyes at him. "Well, why do you love Quistis?"

His brow furrowed.

"See, it's not so easy to put into words sometimes."

He shrugged.

"Seifer, what are you planning?"

"A date. Which Wuss is over-complicating--I just wanted to have some fucking dinner with her or something."

"No, not that. Ultimecia--how are you planning to persuade her to let Quistis go? That's what you're going to do, isn't it? She won't do it. I don't understand how you think you can persuade her to just drop a major source of power. If this is supposed to be some noble sacrifice where you take Quistis' place, that won't work either, you know. You're not a descendent of the bloodline, so you're useless."

"Don't worry about it." he snapped.

"No. I want to know what you're doing."

"And I'm not going to tell you, so too damn bad. You date Wuss--you're probably used to disappointment by now." He smiled derisively.

She stood studying him for a moment, something percolating just at the edge of her brain. The answer was there, buried deep in the frontal lobe trying to corkscrew its way free.

He'd planned something monstrous and epic and stupid as well no doubt, and it would probably kill him. This was a man pushed to his limits--a long way for Seifer Almasy--a man who was unlovable yet loved somehow, just in time to lose the woman who offered him something no one else wanted to.

It unraveled him. She'd seen it in the twisted grief mask of pain his face had become while he strangled her--his fingers formed the anchor lines that kept him from falling completely, her throat the ground through which they pierced. Violence was the only way he knew how to hang on.

She didn't like him by any means--he was not the misunderstood sweetheart that just couldn't seem to catch a break, but vindictive, selfish, and overtly obsessed with attention. He tormented Zell endlessly simply because he could, regularly snubbed and insulted the rest of them, and simply didn't give a damn.

But he loved Quistis with everything he had--she could recognize that at least, and acknowledge it.

"Look, you're the one with the tits, even though I'm not completely convinced Zell doesn't have a vagina--could you just pick some stuff up for me? Picnic supplies. Whatever kind of crap your kind is into." He stuffed a handful of gil into her hand. "And…uh…" He flushed uncharacteristically, looking away. "Get some flowers, too."

She folded the currency between her fingers, quirking one eyebrow. "You mean the 'pussy' ones?"

Seifer's jaw clenched. "Just get something nice, all right? Hyne, you're as fucking annoying as Wuss."

The door slammed behind him a moment later, leaving Bria staring at her handful of cash. The fireplace warmth that wrapped its tendrils around her chest leaked into the sudden smile that arched her lips. She'd do as he asked--mostly for Quistis, but maybe a little bit for him as well.

* * *

Two nights later when Quistis ascended her last rung into the pitch dark of the uninsulated 'home' she temporarily shared with Seifer, she thought for a moment that she'd mistakenly wondered into an identical section of city block holding the same manner of control tower--this had to be something similar, but not familiar, after all, because it certainly wasn't the sparse little square of austere cement and inoperative fuse boxes she remembered.

It was…transformed, beautiful…grand. The million adjectives that crowded her mind couldn't adequately express the awe that dropped her jaw and punched her heartbeat through her ribcage up against the thin veneer of flesh that bound her chest.

The room's perimeter flickered in liquid undulations of alternating gold and black, like phosphorescent sea life in a murky sea, or paper lanterns lining the walkway of an elegant garden party, swaying gently in the evening breeze that swung them in pendulum arks of soft yellow.

A small oval table, intimate in its diminutive stature and resting squarely in the middle of the room, had been similarly lit, and wafted the faint earthy aroma of cinnamon to nostrils that flared wide to appreciate its piquant bouquet. Beside the fat candle emitting smoky coils of scent, a crystal vase dripped the elongated teardrops of tiger lilies, vibrantly tangerine in the candlelight.

Red-faced and trying to duck his head as far into the collar of his trench coat as he could manage, Seifer sat on the side farthest from her, legs splayed out before him, blonde hair slightly disheveled.

He looked…youthfully embarrassed, like the anxious teenage boy showing up for his first date with the girl he'd loved since elementary school.

Quistis slowly approached the table.

His eyes looked up at her from beneath the fringe of his long lashes, and her face softened into a smile. This was the Seifer she'd seen in class sometimes, though rarely--the slightly lost little boy who wasn't quite sure why he did certain things, but knew he had to keep doing them, if for no other reason than to keep up appearances. It was why she'd purused his potential the way she had, and ultimately gotten her Instructor's license taken away for her failure--there had always been that tiny seedling of uncertainty in him, even if he thought he did everything with complete confidence.

Was it the uncertainty of a boy who wanted people to like him, but was so used to pushing away that he didn't know how to open himself like that, or was it a glimpse of admiration for one of his fellow classmates that had startled him? She'd never known, perhaps because she'd been too busy trying to ensure that the far more intriguing case of Squall Leonheart didn't remain unsolved.

"What's all this?" Quistis asked quietly, leaning down to sniff the flowers.

"Look, I didn't do this. I mean…it was maybe my idea, but Wuss' snooty girlfriend took it _way _fucking overboard."

"Bria helped you with this?"

"I gave her the money to go shopping for a few things, and she went bat shit--what the hell is wrong with you women, anyway?" He nestled his chin deeper into his collar. "Look…we've just never been on a date before, so I thought…_fuck_." Nervous fingers combed hair back from his face.

"It's very sweet, Seifer, thank you." It was both sincere gratitude and gentle tease--cleary he wanted no acknolwedgement of his gesture, and it amused her to see him out of sorts. He'd always been good at faking cockiness even on the rare occasions he didn't actually feel it, and this inept side of him struck Quistis as oddly endearing.

She stood next to her chair, waiting.

He looked up with another scowl.

"Aren't you supposed to pull my chair out for me?" Quistis asked, laughing softly to herself.

His answering grunt carried a million different insults that he didn't voice aloud, but to her drop-jawed astonishment, Seifer actually stood up, rounded the table, and pulled out the straight-backed wooden seat across from him. The scowl he wore said he didn't want to hear a thing, and she could see his chin begin to slink back down beneath his collar again.

She stared the entire time, until he heaved a pissed-off sigh, grabbed her by the arm and manhandled her into her seat.

"Seifer." Quistis said when she had finally regained her ability to speak.

He dropped slowly into a crouch in front of her, hands clasped between his knees, and finally met her gaze.

She brushed hair from his eyes and left her hand on his cheek, smiling down onto his gradually softening face. What had it cost him to plan this? Not in terms of monetary value, but emotional. This would be one of their last 'moments' as a couple, or however they wanted to define themselves and the emotions that flashed in his eyes and burned like electrical current in her fingertips.

Quistis leaned down and softly kissed him. He rose up onto his knees, following her lips, chasing the warmth of her mouth--one of the few remaining body parts with proper circulation. She curled her free hand and its death chill in her lap as he slid his hands around the back of her neck and into her hair, his breath hot like a summer night across her face.

Like the summer nights they used to have together as children, filled with laughter and ocean waves and high-flying kites twirling like rainbow-painted birds spiraling through the clouds. A few more puzzle pieces of her childhood snapped into place, and Quistis saw Matron holding a bottle of suntan lotion and chasing a belligerent Seifer down the beach. Zell, cheerily building a sand castle that he might actually be able to complete, with Seifer distracted; Irvine, offering Selphie a ragged handful of flowers that amounted to nothing more than scraggly weeds; Squall, standing by himself in the shallows, ignoring the patient coaxing of Ellone, trying to get him to play with the other children. Following Seifer from the cozy heat of her bed to scold him as he sneaked out to play--falling backward in awkward shock as he turned on her and kissed her, just because he could and because she was being 'so _damn _bossy that he just wanted to shut her up,' something else she berated him for, because Matron had told him not to use words like that.

They were summers they wouldn't have again. Nothing could bring back the playful innocence of her youth, where nothing more than skinned knees and a few harsh words from the orphanage bully could damage her, but she'd dreamed--the rare moments when she'd allowed herself to--she'd dreamed…of new summers, with a grown-up Seifer running down the same beach with her, helping to renovate the slowly-falling-into-disrepair lighthouse, the gradually-maturing man and the petulant boy living peacefully together inside his eyes.

They couldn't even have that now.

Quistis buried her face in his shoulder, and he held her with the kind of gentle reverence she used to daydream about receiving from Squall. Squall would understand her secret fears and her doubts and all the little insecurities that cracked the flawless Quistis Trepe façade apart from the inside. He would understand them, accept them, and love her even more simply because she _wasn't _perfect. But not the loud, cocky, harassing jerk who constantly interrupted her lectures and undermined her authority from the back of her classroom, where he spent most of his time alternating between not paying attention and randomly launching projectiles at Squall's head--_her _Squall, whose lone wolf exterior she would one day crack, to reveal a kind young man who just needed her patient attention and acceptance. Never him. Seifer Almasy was the annoying curiosity that held your attention for one awestruck split second, like a falling star, and then he was gone, and logic prevailed once more to remind you that even if he was talented, he'd never live up to his potential the way your other students would.

And yet, in the end, it _was _him. In the end, it wasn't Squall's arms encircling her, or Squall's cheek resting on top of her head, or his aloofly cold face breaking into a smile just for her.

In the end, it wasn't Squall's heart that would break the hardest when she died.

---

"So I'm your first, right, Instructor?"

Quistis looked up from her well-seasoned dish of pasta carbonara into his smirking face, and frowned without any real anger. "I don't think that's appropriate dinnertime small talk."

He set down his fork, looking vaguely miffed. "So…what? I wasn't the first guy to get in your pants?"

Quistis hid her smile. Hyne forbid, Seifer Almasy was second or even third to stake his claim on the infamous Ice Queen who opened her heart to no man. "You were the best, Seifer, if that's what you're concerned about."

His entire face twisted. "'You were the best, Seifer'? How many guys have you slept with?"

Quistis took a sip from her wineglass, trying not to laugh. Wasn't that what every man most wanted to hear? What did it matter if they were the one to take the woman's virginity, so long as he above all others stood out in her mind for his lovemaking prowess? "There was another cadet, a little while before I got my instructor's license, when I was sixteen. It wasn't really much to write home about."

Seifer sat back in his chair and crossed his arms, glowering so hard Quistis thought his face might actually shatter. "So I'm better than some fumbling third year idiot who probably pawed you like you were his first steak dinner in ten years? Gee, thanks. What a fucking _honor_." The anger rapidly cleared from his face, vanishing like a wiped-clean school slate, to be replaced with dawning horror. "It wasn't Squall, was it?"

Now Quistis did laugh--sex and Squall to her were two completely opposite subjects that had no business being in the same sentence, not unlike 'nuclear physics' and 'Zell's favorite hobby'. She'd wondered, inappropriately, during the infatuated state she'd existed in until Rinoa came along to shatter any delusions she possessed of ever melting the frigid cage around his heart, if Squall even felt sexual desire. It was a topic she'd wrestled with--he was a teenage male, with all the raging hormones that entitled, so he must feel _something_. And yet, where was it? She'd never seen him surreptitiously glance at her breasts, or ogle the female cadet who wore her skirt slightly too short. He looked at whatever the situation called for him to look at, coldly assessing it, taking action, and then not even verbally acknowledging his accomplishments or infrequent failures.

Seifer, on the other hand, had constantly made both subtle and not-so-subtle comments about her female attributes and what kind of use she could put them to, from asking her seriously how sturdy her desk was, to lewdly winking at her and making sexual suggestions with his hands in an attempt to distract her during class.

"Was it?" he demanded, pulling her back into the present.

"Was it what?" she asked innocently.

Seifer narrowed his eyes at her. "Don't fuck with me, Quistis. Did you screw Squall?"

"I prefer to think that it meant a little more to both of us than a simple screwing." she replied solemnly.

His jaw dropped; she watched his cheeks bleed color like a knife-slashed throat, draining to the same pallor as her own skin. "…Are you…you actually…_fuck_!" He buried his face in his hands for a second, that ripped it back from his palms, jaw clenched like a winched-tight cable. "_Squall_? You fucked _Squall_? What, you just couldn't resist the fuzzy collar anymore? Or was it his fucking _charm _that won you over?"

Quistis carefully arranged her face in the natural frown lines of attempted reason in the face of irrational anger. "We were young, Seifer. I thought I loved him, and it happened. Why are you so mad? It isn't like Squall encroached on your territory. And you had Rinoa first."

"I didn't sleep with Rinoa!" he snapped, standing up so quickly his chair clattered to the floor.

She slid her arms in two pale arcs around her stomach, holding herself together as she finally let go and began to laugh.

---

It took a moment for Seifer's rage-hazed mind to clear enough to register her sudden fit of mirth, and then relief jabbed its needle teeth into his strung-taut muscles, and his fists slowly opened into loose palms.

She was fucking with him. Quistis You-Must-Take-Things-More-Seriously-Seifer Trepe of the thousand boring lectures he'd constantly thwarted, was teasing him.

It made him smile, just for a moment, because sitting across from him, her eyes squinched shut around laughing tears and her lips split wide in the smile he loved most, she was the most fucking beautiful thing he'd ever seen. His chest snapped tight around his heart like the steel jaws of an animal trap, and he remembered that this woman, this revered idol of perhaps hundreds, loved him. Not Squall or the pretty cowboy or, Hyne forbid, Chicken Wuss, but the barely-human skeleton man of a thousand battles and deaths and tragic endings he'd spelled out in whiplash arks of a bloody Hyperion that stood across from her. The man who'd been weak enough to allow some ruthless bitch to mind-rape him, the man who'd tried to be one of the good guys, and failed, then tried to take over as the enemy, and failed at that too. The man who was just one big fucking failure all rolled up into the 6'2" steel frame of an experienced warrior's body--the kind of man everyone thought would be the hero of the story, but was really just the trivial sidekick that eventually tried to kill everyone just for his share of the spotlight.

Seifer could feel that man weighting him down like shackles, like two-ton barbells strapped to his chest. The weight was centered there, on his beating heart, on the in and out flex of his lungs, and the suction-cupped clench of his stomach where it vised around his spine. That man who felt like a thousand squatters all camped out in his chest and across his shoulders tried to tell him this woman wasn't really his--she belonged secretly to his greatest nemesis, or the idiot little martial artist with his twenty left feet. But she wasn't his--because who wanted something ripped apart a hundred times over and patched ineffectively back together, leaving gaps and split seams everywhere?

Seifer pictured that man standing in the palm of his right hand, and crushed him. He smashed down his doubts and his terror, and--most of all--his insecurities about this woman sitting across from him, laughing like she wasn't dying, laughing like the end of the world wasn't collapsing in on them like imploding buildings.

Laughing like she was just enjoying herself with the man she loved.

He compressed everything down into one miniscule cube of suppressed emotions, the way he had done every time his frustrations over a failed training session had boiled over into his discouraged snarl, the way he had every time Squall bested him, the way he had every time he wondered if maybe, just maybe, Quistis wasn't with him out of anything other than pity. But even compressed feelings eventually stack themselves into neat, towering rows, and sooner or later there is nowhere left for them to go. He'd run out of space, finally.

So he let go. He let that man go, because it wasn't who Quistis deserved, and it wasn't the kind of man who would save her.

And it wasn't the kind of broken, starved-for-attention pitiful idiot that Seifer wanted to be.

Amazing, how much…_lighter _he felt.

Seifer picked up his dinner in one hand, and flung olive-oil marinated pasta into Quistis' face, landing some directly in her wide-open mouth.

Then he threw back his head and laughed, and it was the first time in a long time it was just him laughing--without Ultimecia, without the hysterical final moment giggles of a soldier who is too prideful to die crying on his sword, without that man.

Quistis' retaliatory throw splashed dark sauce down the front of his shirt. He lunged around the table for her before she had a chance to escape, and took chair and former instructor down together, protecting her from the brunt of the impact with his arms, then smearing sauce from his shirt across her face as she yelled and ineffectively tried to fend him off.

He couldn't stop fucking laughing. His entire stomach burned, each muscle fiber activated in a way most exercises could never emulate.

Seifer kissed his way from her jaw to her temple, spreading sauce with his nose, still laughing helplessly as she whipped her face out of his reach and pushed her hand into his chin, turning his head away. He dove in again, breaking her grip, his mouth hitting hers, his arms contracting around her.

He was going to save this woman. He was going to save this fucking woman, and go down in fucking flames to do it, just like he was meant to end.

* * *

Three days later, Squall returned for Seifer.

The sun had just barely begun its inevitable death high above the city--its slow-leak gore light that turned the metropolis' star studs of flashing lights into rubies--when Squall poked his stoic face into the control tower.

The sizzle of rain formed a strange accompaniment to the bright twilight, subtle flickers of diamond against the backdrop of garnet spearheads. It made for a beautiful tapestry of light and sound all woven skillfully together just in front of the view port of the glassless window Seifer and Quistis stood in front of, Garden's most difficult student and his greatest competition leaning into his former instructor's fragile back, his arms around her waist and his chin propped on her shoulder.

It was the single most startling sight Squall had ever witnessed. The killing hands wrapped so carefully around Quistis' wasted figure…the snarling face brushing the same kind of tender, feather light kiss along her neck that he'd once bestowed upon Rinoa…and the loose relaxation of his body, no longer a soldier's vessel, just a young man enjoying a sunset view with his pretty girlfriend.

It made him think about how eventually, perhaps in another world, under different circumstances, they could have been friends. It made him think that, perhaps, Seifer wasn't so different from himself on a fundamental level.

Then he remembered Rinoa, her filleted spine gaping around the shiny butcher's blade of Hyperion, and his wartime images of Seifer returned to him. Just for a moment, one wild, county-fair-ride spinning of blood and flashing teeth and blurring silver and power-glazed green--

And then, in that nuclear blast intensity of the sun touching distant water, Squall saw Rival Seifer, Bully Seifer…not evil, just immature and ambitious. Childishly selfish and attention-hungry, always vying for the most stares, the most reactions. Most loved or most hated, it didn't matter so long as he had the _most_.

Neither looked like the man embracing Quistis.

Seifer turned as Squall fell automatically into at-ease posture, hands linked behind his back, legs braced; the sunlight edged his scar in gild red, the same blood rose furrow it must have painted Squall's. He didn't see surprise in the green eyes--he'd been quiet climbing the ladder, but you never could be entirely silent scaling countless feet of metal rungs, some rusted or partially missing.

Squall said nothing as Seifer turned back to Quistis. She sighed heavily, undoubtedly having heard him as well and assuming it was perhaps Zell or another friend come to destroy their peaceful moment. No, not Zell--Quistis would certainly be able to infer that she would have already known it was him, having heard him coming three miles away.

Her face--gaunt, pale, and far too drum-skin tight over pronounced cheekbones--betrayed shock and panic that she normally never would have let slip.

Either she was far too tired or weak to hide so much anymore, or Seifer meant that much to her.

He thought about that as she disentangled her from the strong arms clasped possessively around her--Hyne, she was so painfully thin. Where was the steel mesh and solid-frozen ice sculpture of the woman who'd once calmly machine-gunned into one fiery blitzkrieg explosion of flying mechanics the X-ATM092 pursuing him up the beach? Where was the neatly-pinned, ironed amd flawlessly styled instructor patiently trying to direct Almasy's uncooperative comments into actual answers?

Squall's heart squeezed in his chest like a fist, the fingers vine-wrapped with barbed wire.

_Quistis…_

"Squall, please--" She took a step toward him, putting herself between the two men, just as she'd done when they were still students constantly butting stubborn heads.

Seifer meant that much to her. It was naked in her eyes; he could barely stand it, the emotion behind those familiar glasses corkscrewing a hole straight through his solar plexus, right into his barb wire fisted heart.

The tall blonde grabbed her arm. "Trepe, what are you going to do if Pubes wants to kill me?" he demanded, wrenching her out of his way. The glare she directed up at him seethed pure interrupted teacher, and Squall could see her again, lecturing Seifer while Dr. Kadowaki patched them both up, leaning beside him on a moonlight-draped balcony railing trying to coax him out of his shell.

_I'm not going to kill him._

He couldn't quite make himself say that. His mouth flexed experimentally, then opened around "Don't worry."

It was the only part of the conversation to which he contributed for quite some time. The couple came together in an equally willful argument that involved several terse comments and angry gestures from Seifer, combated by Quistis' cross-armed sterness and cold stare.

Quistis didn't want to leave; Seifer didn't care. Seifer would throw her over one shoulder and force her down the ladder if he had to; Quistis would remove one of his testicles with surgical precision.

Finally, Squall interjected again.

"I just need to talk to him."

Quistis remained locked in the staring contest between herself and the much-larger gun bladist for nearly another minute, before finally sighing and dropping her arms. "Fine….fine." She pushed her glasses back up her nose.

Seifer muttered something pissy under his breath about her still only listening to Pubes' side of the story, despite the things he'd done to her last night, and Squall thought fleetingly about how much he hadn't wanted to hear that.

"I'll be with Zell and Bria in their motel." she told Seifer, turning back to Squall. "If either of you has a scratch when I come back…" The severity of her tone reminded him again of Instructor Trepe, and he almost smiled.

"_I _won't." Seifer told her, smirking.

This was undoubtedly the same man, even if there were a few slight discrepancies in his overall manner.

Seifer waited for Quistis' head to vanish completely, and the echoing ring of her footsteps to fade away before picking up Hyperion. Instead of assuming guard position, however, he buckled the weapon to his waist and crossed his arms. "Look, Pubes--Leonheart, whatever--I know you're not exactly in love with me right now. But listen to what I have to say and you can kill me after all, you'll just have to put it off a little longer."

Squall's eyes narrowed imperceptibly. It was just a faint tic in the otherwise glacial stone of his features, but he could tell Seifer--having studied him for years picking apart his weaknesses and strengths the same way he himself had done to the ex-traitor--noticed instantly. "You know what's going on with Quistis, right?" Squall nodded. Irvine had filled him in on everything. "Well, I can fucking save her, but I need…" He swallowed visibly, scowled, and looked away, folding his arms more tightly. "…your help."

It must have been the single most difficult phrase the young man had ever uttered, Squall realized.

Had the situation been reversed, Seifer would have taken immense pleasure in rubbing it in the other man's face, lording it over him, strutting a little in acknowledgement of just who was finally the better of the two of them. Squall simply asked how.

"I think I can get that bitch to let go of Quistis, and if she destroys the draw point between them that she's using to feed off Quistis, she can't get it back. Quistis will be out of danger."

Squall stared over the top of Seifer's head out the window for a moment, wondering what the sick apprehension in his stomach was trying to tell him. "Why would she just let Quistis go? She never let Rinoa go, not willingly at least." He could almost say her name without wincing now.

Seifer's eyes burned fanatically--he was either inordinately pleased with his own cleverness, or about to tear Squall's throat out. It was often hard to tell. "I'm going to be her Knight again. I'll offer her protection from the rest of you, but only if she agrees to let Quistis go." He leaned one hip back against the windowsill, waving a hand in the air. "Quistis gets to live, you can kill me, everybody's happy."

Squall imagined Quistis suffering the same flimsily stitched-together wound Rinoa's death had torn through his entire assemblage of internal organs, and nearly threw up. _Not everyone's happy. _

"So you let me kill you."

"No, Pubes, I'm not going to _let _you kill me--if I'm under her control again, I'm not going to half-ass things. So don't fuck up."

"What if you kill Quistis?"

Seifer blanched slightly, and drew a clipped, tremulous breath. "At least this way she gets a chance."

_So what happens if you survive this? How do you live with yourself? _

Squall found himself carefully thinking over the stratagem. Ultimecia had definitely fixated on Seifer for one reason or another, and the temptation to have him within her grasp once more would probably overpower the seductive potential of draining Quistis. She'd seen--as they all had--just how much damage she could do with him.

Which was precisely what also made the plan so dangerous. To be honest, he was not entirely sure he could defeat Seifer, and in the end, it would probably come down to a face to face confrontation between them. They'd always matched up evenly in practice, with only a few stalemates broken by occasional gaps in stamina and strength, until the other caught up. If he lost, they all died. And who knew what the sorceress would do to the world this time. They needed to end it once and for all, and they needed Seifer for that.

But without this sacrifice, Quistis would die for sure.

Seifer stared him down. "I'm right, Leonheart--just admit it."

Squall drew a deep breath.

He could agree, and help save her, or forfeit one to save many, and deal with a loose cannon Seifer Almasy on his hands, not to mention the death of a close friend on the heels of Rinoa's own untimely demise.

Squall shut his eyes, bringing one hand to his forehead and scrubbing angrily. "All right. I think I know where she is." He opened his eyes again, slitting them against the tropical sun flare of the fading day, its vanishing heat shoving needle hooks beneath his lids. Beyond the square-cut monotony of surrounding walls, the rain hissed away its steady heartbeat concussion against distant streets. "Trabia Garden. Some students are disappearing--she's probably using them as hosts. And it's moved to just a few miles up coast, which would put her close to the new body she's building. I don't know where they're hiding her inside."

"I'll find her." Seifer assured him. "I'll get out of Deling tonight somehow." Something pinched and uncertain contorted his face in a mini-spasm of emotion. He shifted from one foot to the other, looking away, then fumbling with something in his pocket. "Look, I need someone to give this to Quistis, and Wuss will either read it or tear it up, so…" He hesitated.

Squall stoically held out his hand, and Seifer thrust a crumpled piece of paper into it.

"Give it to her after everything's over." He crossed his arms again, looking awkward; it was an expression he couldn't recall ever seeing cross the sneering bully's face, and Seifer wore it oddly, like he couldn't quite get the hang of it. "Rinoa…I did what I had to."

It amounted to an apology between these two soldiers virgin-new to expressing feelings and acceptance through the scar tissue of old and bitter wounds.

Squall regarded him coldly for a long time. He listened to Rinoa berating him for not appreciating how hard Seifer was trying, for clinging to the ancient grudges and hard feelings between two children. He listened to himself grunting out the panted exertion of his next swing, parry and riposte, to the surf rush of blood in his ears, and the adrenaline-jacked flutter of his heart. He watched Seifer return his attacks, slip through his defenses, skip back from retaliations, watched the warrior's dance that they had waltzed countless times, changing leads, switching counts, but always in step, always beautifully-executed, if not entirely flawless.

And finally, finally, Squall Leonheart's face cleared of its robotic stiffness, if not entirely and only for a moment.

"Ultimecia killed her." he said quietly, and stuck out his hand.

---

Something was clotting in his fucking throat. The words that dropped into the space between them snapped the last chain around Seifer's neck, and for the first time in Hyne knew how long, he realized it was just himself again. No dead soldiers or collateral damage looping the weight of their deaths around his shoulders and across his chest, no million-watt doe eyes staring up at him while he rammed Hyperion home and watched Quistis' lovemaking glow fade to ashen revulsion.

The hand that stretched toward him felt like salvation. _Ultimecia killed her. _He wanted to fucking kiss the man, or back-slap him in the brotherly half-hug Raijin had sometimes forced him into and that he had once initiated, after his friend made SeeD while Seifer looked on, beaming like a proud father even if he was still pissed that they hadn't yet accepted him.

Instead, he grasped the offered hand slowly, matching the strength in Squall's fingers, resisting the urge to mangle his palm in the typical show of manlier-than-thou he'd excelled at back at Garden.

The topography of Squall's callused hand felt like his own, scar-etched and warrior rough, the manual labor grip of someone who worked for a living and not the silken prissiness a sneering part of him still expected, just slightly.

"I'll give you a day to get out before I tell her." Squall promised.

* * *

Getting into T. Garden proved a lot less difficult than it should have, but then again Seifer had always surpassed the other students in sheer success when it came down to breaking curfew and getting away with it. He could attribute that to dedicated practice, the same way he'd honed his gun blade skills.

The reek of Ultimecia surrounded him as soon as he slipped covertly into the darkened building, the dimmed white-gold of overhead nightime lights throwing his reflection back at him from the polished floor. It was a stench that took a fucking raptor's claw to his olfactory senses, and he torqued his features into a grimace, remembering grimly that he would die with this smell in his nostrils.

He'd survive it, until the time came that he didn't need to anymore.

He pried open the door to the library--so identified by the nameplate beside it, the high shine copper of a new penny under T. Garden's dusky illumination. Following the prickling sensation of her presence took him quietly through a side door, down a short flight of stairs, and out into another corridor, where he paused to check for wandering students or teachers before moving onward.

She was in the infirmary. He could feel the bitch everywhere around him--her smell and the sleepily aware recognition of her ugly mind, drowsy and hesitant as though woken from slumber, feeling along the slippery innards of his skull like it could remember the weak spot those questing fingers had discovered before.

He swallowed down the acidity of bile-drenched panic. He didn't want the freefall terror of having his own willpower snatched from him, not again, not _fucking again _the fetal-curled boy who had cowered inside his head the first time she owned him screamed.

In the infirmary's doorway, Seifer stopped, grinding to a halt like the unlubricated pistons of a fussy machine, locking into the rigor mortis of disrepair. His knees trembled into the liquidly loose limbs of a coward, and he had to counter their sudden buckling with a quick, hard squeeze of his hand around the door frame.

_She was looking right fucking at him. _

The woman sitting up on her paper-layered exam table didn't remind him of the old Ultimecia, the one wearing Matron's face like some kind of scornful mask--his mother's kindness paired with the bitter, withered hatred of the sorceress' eyes. This was just a child--thirteen probably, a new cadet most likely--prettily pre-pubescent, with the cheekbones of a model emerging through the baby-fat curve of adolescence. The cat-slant of unblinking gray eyes ripped him open in an autopsy's surgical incision that peeled back his ribs to show every raw meat slab of internal organ and slippery intestine coil that made up the shaking body of Seifer Almasy.

"_Seifer_?" She used the girl's small, timid voice to lure him into the room, beyond the safety of the hallway and his own survival instincts. He pictured Quistis' face as each tentative boot placement brought him one step closer to her horrible smell and touch, to enslavement and a final few weeks in the kind of hell he'd never wanted to visit again.

_Move. _he ordered himself, tasting blood from the chewed hamburger his teeth had made of his cheek.

"_Seifer? What are you doing here?_" The girl looked bewildered, scared. She reached out to him with peach-tipped finges, her nails softly unobtrusive but girlishly taken care of. He'd seen Quistis wear a similar color once--it matched that dress she'd favored so often, Seifer reminded himself, shutting his eyes as the hand turned to a monster's taloned paw around his throat.

"_You've come back to me._" She used her own voice now, and the gasp that exploded past his lips dropped him to one knee as the pressure of Ultimecia trying to force herself inside burst an ear drum, and a vessel inside his eye. His fingers curled around the girl's lightly-tanned palm--open now like a flower bud as he touched it, and his eyes snapped back open to find her smiling at him.

"Get off me!" Seifer snarled, throwing her back so hard the girl crashed into the vitals machine hooked to the IV line attached leech-like to the vein of her right arm. "I'm not here for you, bitch."

Ultimecia stared coldly up at him from where she lay splayed across the floor, the girl's stolen hair arranged like a spread-wide Oriental fan over soft shoulders, cinnamon-tipped black and past her still-flat chest.

Seifer wanted to slit her throat. He could hook a finger beneath that pointed chin and wrench, stab Hyperion all the way through vertebrae and up into cerebral matter and the dome of her head…

And then he could fucking kiss Quistis good-bye.

"Let Quistis go."

"_Or you'll kill me_?" The girl's smirk was odd, tinged with an antiquated malice that stretched the innocent youth of her features strangely. "_That's not going to work. She'll still die_."

"I know." He inhaled deeply, expanding his lungs, expanding his courage, remembering the hollow map of her face under his fingertips, the bruised shadow arks of illness under her eyes. "If you destroy the link between you and Quistis, you can have me again. They're going to try to kill you. I'm the only one who can stop Squall."

She raised an eyebrow. "_You want to be my Knight again_?"

Seifer scowled. "It's not much of a fucking choice, thanks to you, _cunt_." he snapped.

"_You're not being very persuasive. Are you sure she's worth this_?"

She was worth a million times more than this piece of shit wearing her victim's body like some fucking coat, her smile the dawning realization that her Knight had never really left her after all, just defected for a while. She was worth a million times more than his sanity, or the rest of the haunted existence he would have eked out for a while until someone slipped a knife under his ribs.

Seifer crossed his arms. "Take it or leave it. I can protect you when they come to kill you, or you can start all over again."

---

Ultimecia stroked her mind's nimble fingers over the muscular figure he cut, towering above her like an avenging god, a fallen angel, her beautiful, beautiful Knight returned to her at last. He was either clever, or bluffing well--she couldn't hold him captive, continue to feed off Quistis and construct her new body all at the same time--it would simply stretch her too thin, and this current vessel was already nearing burn-out.

But she could have him again. His fast, cunning mind, and his strong young body under hers, on top of her, inside her, his battered little soul fastened tight in the predator's cage of her powers…

It was a hollow kind of victory, because his loyalty and his love would belong to Quistis until she wrenched them from him--neither had ever really been meant for her, a trespasser through his time who could only have him if she bent him like the slow-yield of superheated metal, but he would worship her. He'd take a bullet right through his pretty skull if it meant sparing her, and she could pretend--she had pretended often when she was a child, after all, hadn't she?--she could pretend, after all, that it was not just the twitch of her puppet's strings that completed the sacrificial dive that would save her from an assassin's weapon. She could pretend it was him, dying for the woman he loved, slaughtering the little blonde instructor because she meant less to him than he'd thought after all--she could pretend it was him, and not just lissome little twitches of her mind, jerking him this way and that.

He stared down at her with his feline soldier's eyes, cold and fierce and the gemstone green of fine-cut jewelry.

"_Kneel_." she told him, forcing the girl's body to its feet despite the whimpering she heard somewhere in the back of her head.

He paused, struggling with himself, she saw, with his own self-preservation and what must have been an immense love for Quistis Trepe--her chest squeezed close around her heart, painfully snug. What had this woman done to inspire this kind of loyalty in her stubborn, proud little Knight?

Seifer lowered himself slowly, setting one knee on the ground, draping his arm across it and bowing his head. She petted it gently, sifting fine gold through her fingers--she remembered the feel and scent and glorious halo brilliance of this hair, and the clean-shaven roughness of cheeks persistently attempting to push through patches of facial hair.

"_Relax_." She breathed, touching his forehead, his cheeks. "_Let me inside, Seifer._"

She shoved roughly inside the moment she felt the collapse of the draw point between her and Quistis, a popped-bubble sensation of imploding pressure.

---

_-and she was fucking_ surrounding _him-_

_-He could feel her inside every part of him, his ears, his nostrils, his overcrowded eye sockets, squirming like snakes' nests, like eel tails shivering with the lit-from-within circuit breaker pops of lightning bursts-_

_-Quistis! Quistis Quistis Quistis Quistis Quistis!-_

_-You're forgetting her, remember? You're just hurting yourself by fighting this-_

_-No, I'm not fucking forgetting her-_

_-He kicked and scratched at the blankly smooth wall of her control, devoid of footholds--he had nowhere to fucking go!--cold like the brush of her painted fingertips--why couldn't he _climb this fucking thing_?--unyielding like the solid ice block of his heart-_

_-Quistis Quistis Quistis Quistis Quistis-_

_-He would chant this forever, hold tight to her long hair and blue eyes and soft lips while Ultimecia dragged him kicking and screaming from the warmth of her arms--fuck you I'm not letting go--and the gentle whisper-brush of her hands-_

_-Seifer, let go of her-_

_-Fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off-_

_-Let go of her _now_-_

_-Quistis! Quistis!-_

_-He could still feel her, she was in his arms right now--goddammit, he could still _feel _her!--cradled there in serene slumber, arms outflung like an angel's pale wings-_

_-She's not moving. She's not moving! What are you doing to her?-_

_-I'm killing her, Seifer, the only way I can now-_

_-Stop it! _Stop it_!-_

_-Can you see her dying? Watch her face, Seifer-_

_-Skin peeled back from the gape-lipped smile of a skull's permanent grin, her forehead popping like an over-stressed rivet and rolling back to reveal muscles fibers packaged in slimy red-_

_-Stop it. Stop it! Fucking _stop it_!-_

_-I have to destroy her, Seifer, so you'll forget her-_

_-I don't want to forget her-_

_-You have to-_

_-Ash in his arms, slithering between his fingers, blown away by coils of wind that curled over her wall with the kind of freedom he didn't have-_

_-He clutched his chest like a dying man--he _was_ dying; this was the seizure clench of a heart attack--and sprang for her wall-_

_-Give her back to me, give her fucking _back _to me-_

_-She isn't worth it, Seifer-_

_-Yes, she fucking is, bitch, shut your mouth-_

_-You have to let her go, Seifer-_

_-Her wall cut his hands--I'm making it--his nails tearing from the beds and slithering down it in ugly slug trails of glistening crimson--I'm going to fucking make it--his boots scrabbling in frantic flutter-kicks that thrust him a few precious feet higher-_

_-Quistis, Quistis don't fucking give up on me, I'm getting over this fucking wall-_

_-Her hand closed around his ankle-_

_-You can't go anywhere, Seifer-_

_-The jerk on his foot pulled him down, pulled him under, and he hit the ground in a storm cloud roil of utter unconciousness-_

_---_

Quistis felt the sudden return of vitality the moment Ultimecia broke the link. It returned with the kind of impending ocean rush that knocked her to her knees, and she clung to the window sill like a drowning woman, sucking air, blinking away the tears of impact that formed beneath her lids.

She slid down the wall with the kind of watery looseness of someone who has lost all control over their motor functions, because that was precisely what had happened--the stupid, brave, reckless idiot had gotten exactly what he wanted, and the knowledge curved Quistis around herself in a limber-spined knot of blind grief.

The gunshot crack of her breaking glasses joined the rain tapping its gentle inquiries at the window and entrance of her 'home' as she pressed her face to the floor, the abrupt spider web impediment to her vision smearing with the tears that ripped themselves from her body in violent, heaving sobs.


	28. Chapter 27

**A/N: So, long time no see. Today I had an e-mail from a member me asking if I was ever going to post the ending to this story-it came just in the nick of time basically, because for a long time I've been contemplating just deleting my account here on . I haven't logged on in a long time, and I'm working on my first original fiction in a long time right now, so I'm pretty much leaving fanfiction behind to concentrate on it. To be honest, I haven't even thought about this story in quite some time. It has basically been finished for a long time now, but I really struggled writing the final couple of scenes-not because I didn't know what I wanted to say, but because part of me was really reluctant to finally see it over. This story consumed me for a long time, so writing the ending was a little depressing because it means that it's really all over, and also because...well, you'll understand when you read it. It was a hard ending for me to write, having followed these characters for so long now. But this e-mail prompted me to do it, and to also post it here, which I had not planned-I hope you guys don't think I was throwing a temper tantrum and witholding chapters for reviews, it just didn't really seem like anyone was following it anymore, so I decided to just finish it for myself and not go to the trouble of loading it on here and fixing the format and whatnot. So I'm dedicating this final chapter to Tequila Princess, beause without your message this story would probably always just lurk around my computer only kind of sort of finished, and it most certainly wouldn't have been posted here. So if you wanted to know how this all ended, you have her more than me to thank. Tequila Princess, I hope you read it, I hope you like it, and thanks for still showing interest in this 8 million years after I dropped off the face of **

**Chapter Twenty Seven**

Trabia Garden

Just Outside Deling City

Ultimecia calmly watched the man's head land with a meaty _thock _on the deck underfoot, the slash mark silver and red of Hyperion finishing its killing stroke in a neat butterfly crescent that brought it to Seifer's right hip.

The breeze from the ocean played idly with his hair, and with a smile, she reached out to touch it.

She had spent her time alone at Trabia Garden subtly manipulating people to do her bidding, bringing the school closer to her beautiful creation to ease the strain on her powers and the frail human bodies she burned through at an alarming rate. Blood shed had not been necessary-the human mind was a wonderfully pliable thing.

But Seifer had his own way of doing things, and under her control he ruled the same way he had governed the halls of B. Garden-through intimidation and physical prowess, only now, with his inhibitions stripped away to reveal the true potential of the man beneath, disregard of his orders carried far more weighty consequences than an open-lipped snarl and a sound beating.

She stepped up beside him, surveying the construction of her new home with a lazy cat's tail coil of satisfaction burning deep in her gut.

He stared straight ahead even when she looked right at him, and the satisfaction turned to bitter ashes in her mouth. She puckered her lips around the taste, and took her hand from his sun-warmed head.

She'd lured him to her bed last night with her nubile new body, this one a nineteen year old cadet, the embodiment of most wet dreams-red cupid's bow of full lips, the lean kind of forever legs men could not resist, and the thick-lashed Bambi eyes of a prettily unintelligent bimbo.

And he'd simply lain there, while she panted and thrusted away above him, the golden wheat of her waist-length hair lying like spindly little tentacles across his arms and his bare chest, his eyes focused on the ceiling overhead…

She felt unclean, like a rapist who regrets what they have just done. Ultimecia glanced again at him out of the corner of her eye, his hair a banner of pure white-gold flung back from the arrogantly chiseled face that had changed little since she last knew it. She had mapped that face last night with her questing fingertips, those cheekbones and the sensual kissing lips that in the end had done nothing even as she tried to force a response from them.

He couldn't find her repulsive-he was her Knight, goddammit, not some finicky child who didn't yet know how to want a woman's touch-

He was still thinking about her, even now, with his mind clenched tight inside her controlling fingers, his soul wound into a compact skein around her will; this had never happened before, and it frightened her.

Seifer still loved Quistis, when he was supposed to be hers.

How had that happened? He was undoubtedly her puppet again, moving when she wished him to, acting when, where and how she wanted him to, acquiescing without a fight when she began to remove her clothes and then his own...and yet, locked deep somewhere inside the vault of his brain, Seifer couldn't forget _her_.

He had never clung so rigidly to Rinoa the first time she'd possessed him.

She was undoubtedly just stretching herself too thin, Ultimecia decided. She didn't have the energy to bleed dry every corner of his mind the way she had before, until only she existed for him.

* * *

Seifer watched the churning, foaming waves through the empty glass prison cells of his eyes. Physically, he clutched T. Garden's steering column with the loose gripping hands of someone who is enjoying the salt-scented breeze, the occasional insect-bite sting of leaping ocean water, and the voluptuous half curve of breast just visible within his line of sight.

But inside…inside, he watched a pair of gem-cut blue eyes crosshatched by strands of blonde hair like miniature golden scars across the retinas, and tried to understand what they meant.

Smiling lips…raspberry-toned pink, not ridiculously plush, but nice. The yellow flushed diamond brilliance of sunlight off glass-off spectacles. Spectacles sitting precisely across the bridge of a perky nose…sliding down, a long finger tapping them patiently back into place.

Why the hell did these things mean something to him? He vaguely recognized the emotions-longing, and a radiant heat in his chest that he might describe as…fondness? Desire?

…Love. Perhaps. Was that it? He wasn't sure-the puzzle pieces of those eyes and lips and hair slid like water through his fingers, spilled onto the deck at his feet like the abandoned game of a frustrated child.

He didn't know what to fucking think. This woman standing beside him was supposed to mean everything to him…he knew that on a subconscious level, from the very well bottom of his soul, and yet…

And yet, those blue eyes and raspberry lips seemed…important. Consuming.

He stared out over the water.

Beside him, she smiled indulgently, her red lips and her bedroom eyes and her model's legs offering him a slideshow flurry of images from the night before: their mingling bodies, the long whip crack arch of her tossed hair, his sweat, and the audio soundtrack of her breathy moans and his interminable silence.

Seifer gripped the steering wheel more tightly, and now he felt like nothing, like an empty grave hole waiting to be filled. He lost his grip on those eyes and those lips and that hair, and then he saw nothing but that vast curdled glass stretch of sea before him, and the same ark of pale breast that hovered just at the corner of one eye.

* * *

Painted in the highlights of their final dawn, Squall watched Quistis finish clipping Save the Queen to her belt and wondered if he should talk to her.

Since Seifer had surrendered to Ultimecia, she'd mostly spent time with herself, running Deling's streets before the sun even unfurled in the sky and evading Zell's well-intentioned pestering, Irvine's gentle concern and Selphie's persistently sunny cheer-up attempts. Sometimes, she let him accompany her, probably-Squall assumed-because he didn't talk and didn't attempt to force her into talking either.

But most days, she was already gone when he quietly ascended the ladder into the empty shell of her 'home,' the sun-glow of her bobbing head just becoming visible from where he tucked himself away into the window's cramped frame as morning brightened the skies over the busy metropolis.

Today, they set out along the beach instead. It was slippery, annoying stuff to run in if you asked Squall, but Quistis never did of course, and he never complained. The sand worked his muscles in new ways, at least, and he needed every edge he could grab ahold of going into this final battle.

She sprinted toward the sea, toward the bright shining globe of Trabia Garden, anchored just off the shoreline.

Toward Seifer.

Squall watched her run as she pulled away. She had always been a confident runner, an efficient runner-perfectly upright with pumping arms moving in flawless, synchronized motion, not a single move, muscle or step wasted, her nimble gazelle's stride carrying her far ahead of him. She had always outrun them all by miles, even as a child, when a laughing green-eyed boy had chased her down the beach screaming sexist jeers and inevitably getting mad when the girl won their race yet again…

Squall blinked, and T. Garden materialized suddenly in front of him, stretching up for miles, outlined in a fiery corona of yellow-orange.

The same laughing green-eyed boy presided over this monstrous demonstration of technology, positioned at its bow with all the sleekly arrogant importance of an arriving prince-with one foot propped on the railing and his scarred, callused hands on his hips, the golden head completing self-important sweeps of his conquered land.

Squall recognized him even from the beach, and felt the ghost slide of a gun blade across his forehead again, a phantom brush of Hyperion swooping down in one silvery, predator bird dive of fatal precision.

What would it feel like to open Seifer's ribcage with his own weapon, crack it like a metamorphasizing butterfly and spill his organs on this same sand in coils of ruby patterned death? He'd imagined it enough times, and yet now…now…

Now, the image gut-punched him hard enough to curdle the bile in his stomach.

Ahead of him, Quistis had slid to a stop in front of the massive Garden, fixated on the same spot Squall had been focused on just a moment earlier. His run died out, and he joined her at the edge of the ocean's first curling wave, its tip drawing uneven lines of foam down the length of the beach and across their sandy boots.

"I suppose this is my good-bye to him." she said quietly, crossing her arms over her chest.

_It doesn't have to be. Maybe you can save him. _

He didn't say it. He wouldn't lie to her.

Squall cleared his throat and tried to ignore the acid chewing a hole through the center of his chest, through porous bone and into the beating heart beneath.

_Quistis…_

He touched her shoulder lightly, and then clasped his hands behind him, dropping automatically into at ease position, standing silently beside her as she stared up at the man he was going to kill today.

* * *

Quistis watched his hair blowing in the wind, faraway like a realistic porcelain miniature, his face a tiny dot on top of long silver, and wondered what it would feel like to watch him die.

Like a nuclear mushroom cloud inside her chest.

Like the end of the world.

She cradled a hand to her chest, already feeling the first ominous reverberations in her solar plexus.

Her eyes slid closed. Squall would make it quick. Merciful.

And if he couldn't? Would she then step up to the plate, wrap Save the Queen's barbed tongue around his throat until its saw-toothed noose broke through shivering tendon and panic-squeezed windpipe and the white blonde fuzz of the back of his neck? Could she do that?

Quistis watched the gold-topped silver square-because that was all he was to her from here-move away from the railing and toward the elevator and thought _No. No, I couldn't do that. I'd let him kill me. _

And then her friends would die, and the sorceress would have the world once more. And his soul.

"Are Selphie and Bria in position?" she asked quietly.

Beside her, Squall shifted. "Yes. We got them in late last night. They're ready when we are."

"All right." The acknowledgement was so softly spoken, she barely caught it herself. "All right, I'm ready." She looked back to see _No you're not _flash across his face before Squall's trademark stoicism dropped back into place. He nodded briskly.

Quistis drew in a deep breath. "All right." How many damn times was she going to say that already? It would never be true anyway. Watching Squall ram several feet of unforgiving steel through Seifer's spine would never be 'all right,' and she could never be ready to witness the red-frothed arc of clotted blood explode from between his lips as he died at Squall's feet.

Maybe he would drag himself a final few inches and die at her own feet instead.

She fisted a hand at her throat. _Seifer…I'm sorry. _

Squall was staring at her out of the corner of his eye. Unobtrusively, but she could still feel the weight of his gaze, and she forced her expression into calm nonchalance. "I'd like to stay here for awhile. While you finish…the preparations." Her throat squeezed shut around the final word, and it emerged as a humiliatingly weak croak.

Squall had forced himself to confront the necessity of killing Rinoa to save the rest of them. She could do the same.

No, she couldn't. Quistis felt a part of herself ball into fetal position and die-it was the part that remembered Seifer's face between her hands, the part that recalled him looking at her like she was the most important damn thing to him in the world…not rabid worship of an idol, the look that would have eclipsed a Trepie's face, just a man appreciating a woman.

As his teacher, she'd set out to corral him, to save Seifer from his impulsive, aggressive self.

And now she would help destroy him.

Quistis felt Squall touch her shoulder again-briefly, but softly. It was the tenderest caress she would probably ever receive from this once upon a time love interest of hers, the man she'd obsessed over for years to a degree unhealthy for both her career and her personal sense of worth.

She blinked back the hot sting of tears and watched him retreat up the beach, until she could no longer see him and Trabia Garden was once more the only piece of scenery worth staring at.

The silver dot with its cap of gold had reappeared, this time at the railing facing the shoreline where she stood with her arms curled tightly around her middle, trying too hard to make out a single human nuance of the featureless spot above her.

Quistis watched him for a long time, until he turned away and paced across the deck to the opposite side.

She had committed only a few insignificant acts of impulsiveness during her entire lifespan, the bulk of which could be counted on one hand. Hers was an ordered existence and one not forgiving of upheavals of even the smallest kind, which lent some insight to her violent balking at the developing feelings between her and Seifer.

This particular moment of spontaneity would probably be her last.

* * *

_And the puppet begins to chafe at his strings. _Ultimecia thought with a scowl, watching Seifer's jerky pacing from the doorway of the elevator. He looked windswept and beautiful the way her Knight should, but with the vague frown lines of the kind of weighted thoughts she didn't want him having.

She moved into the sunlight, dimly hearing the doors whoosh shut behind her.

She had sensed it-faintly, but the connection between them was still tenuous enough to allow a slight hum along her senses-the moment Quistis boarded T. Garden. Whether the others accompanied her she couldn't be sure, although she tended to lean toward the notion that the little blonde instructor probably hadn't been stupid enough to come alone, which meant this was to be their final confrontation.

And her Knight would have the chance to prove himself once and for all.

"Seifer." Ultimecia addressed him formally, raising her voice to allow it to carry on the salty wind. "They're here."

He snapped instantly to attention, hand surging to Hyperion, the fever glow of impending battle glazing his eyes.

She smiled to see it-but rapidly the curl of her full lips sagged into the pinched line of extreme displeasure. His blank doll's face had held such…_joy _the last time, and now it held all the character of a storefront mannequin.

_Why the fuck couldn't he just love her? _The internal voice sounded like the nasty, bitter crone hack of an old woman resigned to die alone, and it infuriated her.

She hated Quistis fucking Trepe. _Hated _the stupid, pretty little bitch to whom he'd willingly given what she'd had to force him into loaning to her. But then, the Quistis Trepes of the world always got the man in the end, didn't they? The man and the renown and the love, just because they were elegant and aloofly beautiful and just so fucking wonderful that people couldn't help falling all over themselves when in their exalted presence.

Ultimecia felt her heart swallow the fiery nova of her rage.

She met Seifer as he stepped forward into the shadowy tower of the elevators and curved an arm around his own, lifting her chin into the regal carriage of a queen preparing to meet her subjects.

Her smile stayed put this time. He might have loved Quistis for real once upon a time, but now she was nothing more than a threat to the woman who had forced her way into his soul.

Ultimecia imagined one shiny lacquered fingernail reaching out to thrum his strings, the responding twitch, and the subsequent blur of Hyperion, severing Instructor Trepe's graceful swan's neck from the rest of her body.

* * *

The moment Quistis stepped out onto the empty top deck of Trabia Garden, the full realization of how utterly, hopelessly stupid she truly was struck her with the full hammer blow force of a direct shot to the ribs.

What exactly had she expected? A penitent Seifer waiting with open arms and a brilliant, engaging smile that assured her he was himself and not the sorceress' pet?

She had ruined everything. The scrupulous instructor who berated careless and lackadaisical students of the kind Seifer himself had once been had just committed the most grave of errors, and now everyone would pay for her indulgence in a romantic whim.

Beyond the railing, the sea boiled beneath the school's rounded foundation, and ocean scent stung her nostrils. She could see the wide-curved 'v' of faraway birds in the perfectly blue sky, and the desert heat shimmer of Deling City off to her left.

When she heard the elevator doors hiss open behind her, she spun with his name on her lips.

The look in his eyes killed the syllables that sprang from her throat and onto her tongue.

He didn't know her. She could see it in his face and the shadowed glow of his narrowed gaze, and the way he drew Hyperion in one swift, efficient motion-a killing machine programmed to target her.

Quistis reached for Save the Queen, but it was just a reflex, just a soldier's muscles flexing automatically into readiness at the first hint of battle, and even as her fingers brushed the weapon belted to her side, she knew she couldn't actually use it on him.

She felt the slow-beat pulse of her heart thudding in her throat as he stood looking at her, gun blade a vertical gray slash through his taut face.

A theater show frozen into immobility for one split second moment of extended drama.

Quistis let go of Save the Queen and shut her eyes.

His first step struck with the ringing finality of a struck bell, one hesitant shuffle forward, and then he sprang into motion, into liquid speed that carried Quistis' death toward her in one stampeding herd clatter-her eyes flashed open at the last moment, to watch Seifer rear back, Hyperion positioned over one shoulder, his powerful back swing reversing into a final silver blur that slammed home between her eyes.

She ducked instinctively-her soldier's instincts could conspire to save her one last time, even if they couldn't persuade Quistis' nerveless fingers to unfurl Save the Queen and do what simply had to be done.

Hyperion clanged off the railing, denting it and throwing Seifer off balance.

Quistis threw her shoulder into his stomach, pile driving forward, overbalancing him further and sending them both crashing to the deck underfoot, Seifer's gun blade spinning off toward the elevators. "Seifer, look at me!" she screamed, grabbing his cheeks between her hands-this was useless, unwise, just one final, desperate bid by one who already knows the end of the story, but fights to change it anyway. She could feel her eyes streaming freely, blurring his vacant features, vaguely annoyed now but still not reminiscent of his nuclear anger.

He grabbed her hair roughly, forcing her head back, exposing her throat-and then his hand closed around the fragile expanse of her windpipe, and the world fuzzed into black-tinged unconsciousness around Quistis. She held on frantically, grasping at the elusive threads of cognizant thought like they were the last bits of still-floating debris off a sunken ship in the middle of a lonely ocean.

She gagged his name and he hit her this time, his knuckles splitting her lower lip, his other hand slipping just enough on her throat to allow a pinhole of air through-she choked on it, gasped on it, and his fist snapped her head back again-this time in a plume of blood as he broke her nose.

The force of his punch threw her off him, onto her side two feet away, one rib protesting the landing with a mule kick of blinding pain that blurred her view of him getting back to his feet.

"Seifer…"

_He doesn't know who you are, you idiot. Right now you're the enemy. Either get up, or he's going to kill you. _

It was this amazingly calm internal voice that prompted Quistis onto her hands and knees as his boots thudded back around toward her, the same voice which had coached her through battlefield gore and slippery entrails and dying children and Matron's bloody demise right before her eyes.

_Talk to him. You have one chance to save him, or Squall will have to kill him. _

"Seifer…Seifer, _stop_." Quistis slurred, trying to employ the sternness of her instructor's tone through blood and torn cartilage and her own overwhelming despair. How did she stop this…thing? He wasn't her unruly student anymore, generally unmanageable and frustrating but not psychopathic.

"_Seifer_!"

The full weight of her grief ripped itself free of her vocal cords, and for one heart stalling moment, she thought a distant part of him understood. He paused in the act of fisting a rough hand in the front of her shirt, and stared down at her for a full five seconds.

And then his other hand reached out to slide lovingly over Hyperion-resting just a few inches from her head, glinting menacingly in the sunlight-and Quistis knew she had lost.

* * *

She watched from the shelter of the elevator bank, resentment festering like sour food on her tongue and in the pit of her gut. Her Knight shouldn't have hesitated-the little bitch should have died with the first inexorable thrust of the weapon he clutched now in one hand, its point drawing a shivery line up throat flesh that flinched back from its cold touch.

And yet he had. He had faltered for just one infinitesimal second, and now instead of Quistis' detached head trailing spurting arteries across the salt-stained deck, the woman herself kneeled in front of him with blood and tears soaking her face, murmuring his name in hoarse, pathetic croaks that made Ultimecia want to kill the SeeD herself. She had once been just as pitiful as the image Quistis presented now, and the reminder sickened her.

_Punish him. He needs to understand that you can give him whatever he wants, and take it away just as quickly. _

She tapped one heeled foot on the floorboards beneath her, a staccato _thump thump thump _that neither participant in the unfolding drama noticed.

Then, with one gut-clench moment of uncertainty postponing her decision for just a moment, Ultimecia abruptly let him go.

* * *

Seifer fell back into himself as Hyperion drew blood, its point dimpling the hollow of her throat, a dime-sized pockmark that cried red down the pastel ark of her throat.

His hand opened, and the gun blade struck her knee flat side down and bounced off as he stumbled backward. _What the fuck am I doing? _

Her nose…her fucking nose…and the finger-shaped stripes imprinted on her throat…_what the fuck was wrong with him_?

Horror pushed a veritable ocean wave of bile into his mouth, and his body gave him just a split second warning before he dropped to his knees and vomited all over the deck only a foot or so from where she kneeled. It felt like giving birth to his fucking heart through his throat, acid and self-disgust stripping it of protective lining, something like a heated stone wedged securely behind his tonsils and inside his chest, blocking the breath that whistled narrowly out between his lips.

Shakily he wiped his mouth clean, paused for a moment, and then threw up again.

"Seifer." Quistis whispered.

"Quistis." he gasped, smearing vomit across his chin with the sleeve of his coat. "_Fuck_." He lifted his eyes to her as she tentatively reached out a hand to touch one of his, fisted into the rigor mortis of a new corpse on the boards of the deck beside his pile of vomit. Her palm burned his bruised knuckles, and he sucked in a hiccupping breath. "Sorry." he choked out, his hands shaking violently as he brought them up to her nose, hovering but not actually touching. "Fucking Hyne, I-" _Almost killed you. Fucked your face up good. Pick one of the above, you sick asshole. _And perhaps even worse than either of those-he'd made her cry. He could see fresh tracks through the blood of her flattened nose, and new drops clinging to dewy eyelashes.

She grasped the lapels of his coat and buried her face in his chest, and Seifer threw his arms around her, hiding his face in her neck, kissing the soft warm skin there, breathing in the scent of her hair as she hugged him.

"Quistis." he said raggedly. He kissed the side of her face, gently and then more firmly, his mouth tracing the curve of her cheekbone to the subtle indentation of her temple.

She left crimson stains across his lapels and the front of his shirt when she pulled back, and something inside him shattered as his eyes fixated on her ruined nose again.

How the fuck could he have laid a hand on this woman, regardless of the circumstances? It had been bad enough when he'd knocked her out for her own safety. But now…now, he'd beaten her, plain and simple, like the abusive husband who finally snaps and continues raining blows until pulled away by outraged relatives.

Seifer felt like throwing up again.

_Ultimecia-_

He spun, still crouched down now in front of Quistis as he heard the first approaching footstep and the nerve endings shot through with _her _jangled a warning.

He would always recognize her when she looked at him like that, no matter what form the sorceress took.

Behind him, he felt Quistis rise to her feet, slowly, probably a little shakily, but no doubt with the kind of quiet dignity she always seemed to exude somehow.

Seifer stretched out his hand for Hyperion.

He took up a stance in front of his old instructor as Ultimecia stepped out of the shadows, smiling at him. He could feel his lips peel back off his teeth, locking into the grimace of the hero making his final stand, taking his final bow before the end of the story-

And his world burned away in one last nuclear explosion of blinding white and midnight black.

* * *

Quistis knew the exact moment the sorceress took him back. She saw it in the seizure spasm of his muscles, in the abrupt slackness and the echoing clang of Hyperion as it smashed to the deck at his feet. She heard it in the shift of his breath, from ragged fear to the metronomic steadiness created by her will.

Her heart balled itself into a stone inside the pit of her stomach. His blank doll expression lit the match that sputtered feebly inside the snarl of her guts, and her abdomen cramped in agony.

When his hand closed around her throat this time, she didn't even blink.

* * *

When she didn't make the rendezvous time, Squall guessed with nauseated certainty what had happened.

She'd gone to save Seifer. Because in the end, she couldn't kill him, the same way he had never taken care of Rinoa in the only way that was left. Because she thought the power of her love would bring him back to her-because she thought her touch, her face, her pleading voice would snap the puppet strings and fling him, newly released, into her arms.

Because she thought the same damn thing Squall had, the same damn thing that pushed him upright in a sweat-soaked bed draped in the fading miasma of nightmare demons-because he knew, he _knew _dammit, that if he had just tried harder, just been a little bit stronger, then Rinoa, Rinoa…

Rinoa would still be dead. Just as Seifer would still be a prisoner, no matter what Quistis did.

He felt Zell staring at him, and Irvine trying not to.

The intercom speakers overhead hissed static, then coalesced into Selphie's voice. "Ragnarok on-site!"

Squall stared down onto the shimmering globe of T. Garden, his heart crawling into his mouth, inserting claws like miniaturized meat hooks into his throat and his tongue for purchase, making him want to vomit blood. The new-penny burn of his own gore puddled in the riddled pit of his cheek, chewed down during the short flight, his teeth screwing down tight now as he watched Zell and Irvine unbuckle themselves and stoically check weapons.

His thumb caressed the button of the radio on his belt for a moment before actually depressing it.

"Open the exit hatch." he instructed quietly into the radio's mouthpiece.

"Righty, boss!"

He wished he hadn't recklessly thrown Lionheart into the ocean he'd thought carried Rinoa's lifeless body. He wished Quistis hadn't irresponsibly rushed off to save a man who'd had his chance at redemption and flunked out once again, just as he'd done with just about every class other than Weapons 103 and Unarmed Combat 516.

Squall looked down at the gun blade he drew from its case, alive with the new metal shine of a weapon fresh from the forge, showing him his own face, scarred and drawn and pinched into the kind of frown Rinoa used to tease him about.

She wasn't here to smooth the line from his damaged forehead anymore, and he couldn't do it himself.

He wished Seifer didn't need to die, and he wished he didn't have to be the one to bring the former traitor to his end. But mostly, he wished he would stop wishing for ridiculous shit that wouldn't come true, and get on with what needed to be done.

He put his weapon back and stood. He was their leader, and they couldn't see him falter, never mind that he felt about as flimsy as a child's paper doll house ripped to shreds by late afternoon wind through a window left negligently open.

Squall nodded to Irvine and Zell.

Irvine clapped him on the shoulder as he passed. To the back of the passenger bay, the landing platform shivered and then began to lower, hydraulics giving one momentary screech of protest before settling into smoothly-oiled competence.

Zell leaped first. Squall watched his parachute blossom against the sky like spring fast-forwarded, opening its vibrant blooms to the sun's welcoming rays.

He reached the edge of the platform as Irvine dove, gripping the steel piston of the landing gear in one white-knuckled hand, looking down through the clouds and the flock of birds that suddenly scattered like hunter-stalked prey, frightened by the explosion of Irvine's chute.

T. Garden blinked up at him, like a beacon, like the gigantic x on a treasure map. Land here. Kill here.

Die here.

The breeze off the ocean played with his hair, scattering it across his eyes and his scar and the line through his forehead, the one that would probably be permanent with her gone.

He saw Seifer splashing in the seawater below, taunting Zell and teasing Quistis. He saw himself on the beach, building a sand castle alone, ignoring Ellone's help and shunning Irvine.

He saw Rinoa bleeding out her last moments onto Hyperion, and jumped.

* * *

Zell helped Squall disentangle himself from his parachute when he landed, kicking the entire snarled mess off to one side.

From the top deck where they'd touched down, Squall could see Deling City in its usual state of permanently lit activity, perpetually in motion even as the first subtle touches of sunset appeared on the horizon.

"Start searching the classrooms." he barked. "Everyone will be in the cafeteria right now for dinner. We'll clear each level together. No one splits off from the group."

They'd both heard this before, but nodded anyway. Irvine cocked Exeter, rose from where he'd hunched in a crouch over his pack, and tipped his hat to the still hovering Ragnarok.

Squall started for the bank of elevators against the far wall, Zell and Irvine fanning out to either side of him.

Carried to him on strands of saltwater wind, the back and forth chatter of nearby birds lent the entire scene an eerie normalcy, like the everyday soundtrack of cars passing outside the window of a cheery house whose occupants lie freshly murdered on the floor.

He loosened his gun blade.

Irvine reached the main elevator first, his hand outstretched for the button as his teammates took up defensive positions and the doors slid open.

The blade that opened the cowboy's entire right side and punctured a lung struck too quickly to counter-it swished between the doors before they had even slid entirely open, the three foot space between chrome-polished steel revealing half of Seifer's face, and the deadly arc of Hyperion.

Part of Squall watched Irvine drop to his knees, coughing blood, his ponytail and the trailing ends of his coat fluttering.

The rest of him watched Seifer shove Quistis in front of him through the doors, her eyes the only two bright points of life in her mangled face. She dragged a broken ankle and cradled one snapped arm in her good hand, head down, her sunshine hair painted in random blood spatter patterns of violence.

Squall swallowed the bile in his throat.

Zell, kneeling beside Irvine looking sick, snapped his head up and screamed her name.

Seifer threw her onto the deck, where she stayed in a shattered, pitiful heap. He smiled at Squall, and angled his gun blade up.

Time stopped between them. Squall listened to each halting, liquid breath that Irvine drew like it was someone else, someone else who wasn't his friend or his comrade or one of his only hopes to defeat this man and his puppet master. He stared Seifer down like he wasn't afraid, like this man didn't intimidate him, like he wouldn't care when his weapon chewed Seifer's brain stem in half and dropped him halfway through his next counter attack.

Quistis lifted her head and noisily threw up, and Seifer lunged.

Squall deflected the attack to his left, broke away and circled, remembering Seifer's flaws, trying to determine which would be the fatal Achilles tendon that would bring him down. He sidestepped Quistis' vomit and Irvine's blood and they came together again, in one ringing crash that seemed to echo on forever.

And then Seifer exploded straight forward at him, and Squall remembered why he'd always been so hard to beat. He advanced with each step, his thrust and parries executed with the brilliance and precision of a gifted artist. He pirouetted like a dancer, stabbed his blade into a small opening, and sliced Squall's shoulder from the collar bone to the outer muscle of his triceps.

Squall's fingers opened involuntarily and released his gun blade.

He ducked Seifer's next swing, grabbed the railing behind him, and kicked out with both feet, hitting his adversary in the chest and knocking him off balance.

This was over before it even began.

Seifer's next attack superficially split his scalp. Squall blinked away leaking blood and took a dive for his weapon, somersaulting to his feet in one smooth movement that brought him upright and facing Seifer. He blocked once and then again, his chest locking itself rigidly around the fluttering panic of his heartbeat.

Seifer carved away Squall's right pinky finger like it was nothing, and it fell to the deck between them.

The boot that squished it stomped down callously, and for a moment Squall couldn't tell if the frightening smile Seifer beamed at him belonged entirely to Ultimecia.

Seifer spun, Hyperion a helicopter blur of killing silver. Squall ducked and retreated, in a monotonous drama sequence they played out over and over again, like two siblings playacting for a proud parent's video camera.

Finally, inevitably, his exhaustion destroyed him-made clumsy by blood loss and stiffening muscles, Squall missed a block, and Seifer charged the opening immediately. Hyperion gored his right shoulder, and he screamed, falling back into the railing Seifer had pinned him against once more.

The ex-traitor moved in, grinding the blade into severed nerve endings and flapping skin tissue; the agony that burned his tear ducts didn't fall, but he couldn't hold onto his own gun blade any longer; its landing crash punctuated the end of the fight.

Squall's throat closed over. He hadn't scored even one insignificant hit against the other man-he was going to go out like a coward, kneeling in the oil slick of his own blood as Seifer kicked his legs out from beneath him and yanked his head back by the hair at the nape of his neck.

The sky above him flared in the ruby corona of sundown. It lanced his squinting eyes like a needle, and he closed them gently.

He didn't subscribe to Seifer's over-the-top dreams of blazing glory and explosive ends-he just wanted to see Rinoa again. He hoped he was wrong about heaven; he wanted it to be there waiting for him, he wanted _her _there waiting for him, in their meadow with its cotton ball puffs of dandelion gilded in the rose glow of permanent dusk.

Hyperion ripped out of his shoulder, and Squall sagged forward. He felt the blade dimple his throat and clamped down on his fear-it didn't matter what happened after this. He wouldn't witness the fate of his friends or the end of the world. He couldn't stop either. It was time to relax, time to accept-

"He's not a threat to you anymore. Kill her first."

Squall peeled his eyes open one blood-glued eyelid at a time, and watched a cadet in her neatly-pleated Garden uniform step forward, away from the observation deck to the left of the elevators. Her head tilted toward Quistis, and he realized he wasn't quite done yet, wasn't quite drained of his will to fight-he flung one arm up as hard as he could into Seifer's dominant hand, into the tightly-clenched fingers that gripped Hyperion, and the entire arm jumped and spasmed open in involuntary reaction.

Hyperion cart wheeled over the side of T. Garden and dropped with a splash into the sea below.

"No." Squall rasped, looking up through his bloody bangs into Seifer's furious sneer, into an expression he'd seen more than once across the stretch of training center ground between them. This was angry Seifer, the Seifer who hadn't gotten his way, not the creepy doll-Seifer manipulated by her.

This was the Seifer he could handle.

Squall ankle-swept him.

The crack of Seifer's deck-broken fall echoed like severed bone. His hand landed beside Squall's abandoned gun blade, just for the split second length of time it took Squall to realize his mistake.

Seifer came to his feet with it in his hand, and spun in one flowing semicircle of coat and blade and hair toward Quistis, huddled on her knees and trying to crawl away.

The frantic tackle that Squall launched at the taller man came a moment too late.

* * *

Zell left him with a healing potion and his thoughts. The tonic couldn't work quickly enough to mend his internal bleeding-Irvine could feel that, and it meant he was going to die here on this cold, splintery deck staring into a sky holding Selphie somewhere above the nebulous cloud layer that passed over the falling sun.

He was still holding Exeter in one hand. He tried to pop his fingers open around it, but they wouldn't obey him the same way his feet would answer his command to move with nothing more than minute twitches.

He watched Quistis trying to get to her feet with one broken, useless arm, her beautiful face ruined by the fists of a man Irvine hadn't hated even when he should have, and the first tear of the flood held back by the ineffectual dams of his eyelashes spilled down his face.

Her hair shone like gold where the whiplash strings of blood didn't coat it.

Pretty.

He shut his eyes and tried to remind his lungs how to breathe. They couldn't function around the gore escaping from his side and clotting in his throat, but they needed to keep moving…keep filling…

Oxygen dripped like crystallized honey down his throat. It hit his lungs and burned with acid viscosity, gelling into a clump that blocked what little air he could still breathe.

He felt the breeze grab ahold of his hat where his head crushed it beneath him and yank it out from beneath his half unbound ponytail. It took flight like a windblown leaf, hit the railing and tumbled over it, then spiraled away into the clouds on an updraft of wind.

He wondered if Selphie would see it.

Pain mule kicked him in the gut. Selphie…he hadn't really told her he loved her, had he? He couldn't remember ever doing that. He'd always just thought it was implied, but that wasn't an assumption you could make, now was it? What if she didn't know after all?

He closed his eyes again. He couldn't remember opening them in the first place. His brain offered him observations sluggishly, like the fragment of wood stabbing his left elbow, and the sting of salt in his nose. It told him Quistis was trying to say something to him, dragging herself forward a few blood-streaked feet like a corpse pulling itself from the grave.

_"He's not a threat to you anymore. Kill her first." _

His brain registered that, and he forced his eyes open once more. Squall's protest slammed inside his aching skull. He heard it echoed more loudly by Zell, and then the silver and gold smudge of movement that was Seifer flashed across his dimming vision. He saw the thin point of starry gray brilliance separate itself from the rest of that homicidal streak of anger and hatred, and his fingers-the ones still attached to his gun, his lifeline-twitched with the faint echo of his mind sending its final order to his nerve endings.

He couldn't aim like he used to. His barrel staggered all over the place, skipping from the kill zone between Seifer's furrowed eyebrows to his neck and then his shoulder.

Irvine reached across to steady his right hand with his left.

He saw the downswing of Seifer's weapon, and the wide-open blue drowning pools of Quistis' beautiful eyes. He saw Zell's magnificent leap, a display of athleticism that flung him in front of Quistis in the slender window of time before the blade pierced her back but after Seifer was too committed to the attack to readjust it. He saw that thin point of starry gray brilliance paralyze the martial artist on top of her, separating his spine between the discs fusing it together at the exact center of his vertebrae.

He saw the muzzle flash of his rifle, spitting fire like a dragon hissing out one last desperate defense, and then he saw nothing.

* * *

Squall hit Seifer at the knees as Zell released the kind of shriek that dragged steel claws down his spine. He felt Seifer jerk with impact-not at the knees, but the shoulder, and above him gore plumed like ink from a frightened sea creature. The bullet toppled him backward, over Squall to land in a tangled heap on the deck, his lungs gasping back the wind solid wood had knocked from him.

Quistis cradled Zell in her lap, holding his face between two bloody hands.

Her eyes held his for a moment, shiny with grief, brighter than the spray paint stippling of blood across her hair and her face.

Above him, he heard the whine of the descending Raganarok, and then the explosive boom of Ultimecia's fireball, striking with fatal precision, lighting up the entire sky like a celebratory fireworks demonstration. He watched the sorceress fling another, watched the Ragnarok go into an out of control tailspin, striking the port side of Garden, one entire side of it consumed by flames.

He heard the giant, volatile splash of it in the ocean, and felt T. Garden rock beneath him.

Quistis nodded to him as Seifer began climbing to his feet behind them.

He had his gun blade in one hand and his radio in the other when he spun to meet Ultimecia's Knight, and, off-balance from Ragnarok's crash into the sea, Seifer couldn't dodge the one-handed chop Squall hurled toward him in time.

His head hit the ground separate from his body, the stumps of his neck arteries spraying crimson.

Squall smashed his thumb down on the transmit button. "Bria _now_!" he screamed, and charged the sorceress, tears streaking his face, the deck shifting beneath him in another tsunami roll of furious ocean.

* * *

His command shrilled even over the insistent banging of four guards gradually battering their way into the room she'd barricaded herself inside. Huddled in one corner, gun in hand, shoulders hunched beneath the force of her sobs, Bria stared at the woman floating in her cocoon of water and glass, half-formed and vulnerable.

This woman had once been the reason for her existence. This woman's fate had been hers to guard, hers to preserve.

She thumbed the hammer on her gun.

What did you say at a moment like this? I'm sorry? Don't worry, I won't be far behind?

The door gave an explosive crack, gunshot loud.

Bria sucked in a long, tremulous breath. She guided its calming influence toward her shaking hands, and fired three times.

The first bullet shattered the woman's glass capsule into a fractured spider web of intersecting lines. The second blew out the entire front of it.

And the third ripped open the woman's chest, shattering rib bone and penetrating the heart underneath, stopping it mid-beat as half the organ blew out the back through the exit hole in the woman's spine just as the door gave a final shudder and collapsed inward.

* * *

Quistis looked up from Zell's pale face as Squall's gun blade gutted Ultimecia, folding her over it the same way Rinoa had collapsed across Hyperion. She heard the sorceress scream as Squall angled the blade up, into her chest cavity and the organs protected inside, shredding heart and lungs in one side slash of fury that was all he had left-he fell as she did, panting, his hands still wrapped tightly around the handle of his weapon like the frozen corpse fingers of the newly dead.

She heard Ultimecia's body hit the deck, heard Zell's wheezing breath sliding in short stop and start bursts between his lips.

But she could only see Seifer now, and the glass marbles of his dead eyes, turned up at the sky in unseeing wonder.

The stub of his neck leaked blood toward her, in a slow crawl of pooling red that twisted around her ankles in lazy eddies of darker crimson and frothy pink.

* * *

D-District Prison

2 Weeks Later

Quistis smiled blandly as Cid rose from behind the single desk in the otherwise unadorned interrogation room, bare cement on all sides and lit by the kind of unflattering florescence that had once been a staple in her classroom.

Her guard uncuffed her and then stepped outside, positioning himself just outside the door.

"Quistis." Garden's headmaster whispered, tears filling his eyes.

"Is Squall all right?" she asked, seating herself across from him.

He sniffed and slid his glasses down his nose to wipe briefly at his eyes. "Yes. Yes; I just saw him yesterday. He hasn't been mistreated. You won't be here much longer, I promise. Rinoa's father has helped me to hire two of the best lawyers he can afford."

"And Zell?"

"In the hospital still. The doctors are hopeful he'll be able to walk again eventually, but it'll take several surgeries before that's a possibility. And I believe his career in martial arts is permanently over."

Quistis clasped her hands on the table in front of her, a small knot inside of her chest releasing itself. _As long as he's alive._

"Did you bring the recorder?"

"Yes, I did." he said, reaching inside his vest and producing the small black rectangle, which he then slid across the table. "What do you need it for?"

"The newspapers have erroneously reported everyone but myself and Squall dead, correct?"

"Yes." Cid replied, pushing his glasses farther back up the bridge of his nose.

"There's no reason for it to come out that Zell's still alive. He's suffered enough without being charged with treason as well. And…" she hesitated, swallowing past the burning lump in her throat, the single bulb overhead suddenly blurring out of focus behind the film of tears that covered her eyes. "I want him to have died a hero."

Cid reached across the table for her hands, holding them with the gentle patience of a father. "He did in his own way, Quistis." he assured her quietly.

"I know." She couldn't speak normally, couldn't steady the thin vein of trembling that wound itself through her voice. "But the public won't see it that way. And if we're going to change history, then we have to make sure all accounts match up, even those that aren't supposed to be accessed. As our former headmaster, you'll have to take an official report of this anyway."

Cid nodded slowly.

"The cooperation of T. Garden's headmaster with the sorceress was discovered by…Seifer while undercover there in an attempt to discern the reason behind assassination attempts on B. Garden's personnel, which were thought to be linked to T. Garden." Her voice hitched on his name. "Seifer was held captive by T. Garden, whose cadets did not know they were acting in the sorceress' name. We were sent by B. Garden to rescue him, and things got out of hand."

She looked down at their intertwined hands, Cid's soft pudgy grip of administration, and her callused warrior's fingers. "You'll have to throw us to the wolves at first, sir." Quistis continued softly. "If B. Garden sent SeeDs to investigate T. Garden without tangible proof-"

"It's a political nightmare." Cid sighed in agreement. "I understand." He squeezed her hands tightly, then released them and reached for the recorder. "Our lawyers are investigating right now. They'll find proof that T. Garden was working in accordance with Ultimecia, I promise. We'll get the treason charges against you and Squall dropped."

Quistis nodded, firming her jaw. "Thank you." She inhaled deeply. "I'm ready."

His hovering finger hit the record button.

* * *

The Orphanage

8 Months Later

She watched Zell wheelie his chair down the beach from where she sat with toes extended just past the line of foam marking where incoming surf hit beach, and smiled.

Squall, painting a broad swath of white down the cottage's vine-wrapped right wall, looked up and scowled. He flicked paint at Zell as the energetic young man zipped past once more, catching a splatter of white right across the mouth, which muffled the protest he yelled out.

He was the world's most cheerful paraplegic, Quistis thought with another tiny smile, curling her toes into the sand. Three surgeries after the life-saving one he'd been rushed into after Hyperion shattered his spine, and he still couldn't walk, yet that didn't seem to even faze him. The doctors continued to remain enthusiastic about his prospects, so she supposed that helped.

"Whoo! Quisty, race me down that hill, ok?" Zell yelled, waving his arms at a sand dune about twenty feet up the beach.

She shook her head. "You have wheels, and you're heavier. You'd have an unfair advantage."

"I know! Come on, Quisty! Just once! If you win I'll do the dishes tonight."

"It's your night anyway."

"No, it's…" He tilted his head, pondering this sudden conundrum. "Aww, crap, you're right!"

She laughed and stood up, dusting her pants. "I'm going for a walk. Squall said he could use your help with re-painting the house." Quistis yelled, stifling a giggle as Squall's head flipped around toward her, the glare he stabbed her direction just as lethal as the blade that had destroyed Zell's spinal cord.

Quistis frowned as she started up the beach, cutting around the orphanage and angling up toward the distant golden humps of several dunes. Why had she used that particular comparison? Would she ever be able to erase the image of Zell diving in front of her to take the blow that was supposed to kill her?

Probably not, she conceded, fingering the folded square of paper in her back pocket. Cresting the top of one dune, she slid down into the little rounded bowl of beach not visible from the shoreline, a meteorite-sized pockmark in the earth where six memorials lie in the shade of breeze-stirred grass, higher than her knees and pleasantly fragrant.

She said a brief hello to each of them, then stopped at the final one.

Dropping into cross-legged pose before it, Quistis took a moment to center herself before speaking. "Your posthumous pardon finally went through today. I didn't think it would happen, but I suppose we finally managed to convince them to give it to you." She brushed her fingertips over the flat, cool stone of Seifer's monument, and folded her hands in her lap.

It was the only thing she really wanted to tell him this morning-that would be important to him, she hoped.

Actually, it would probably be more important to him that people knew he'd died fighting the greatest battle of his life.

Quistis smiled hollowly, slipping the paper from her pants and slowly unfolding it along the same worn creases where she'd folded and then opened it a hundred times before this.

_So I guess I'm dead, huh? I suppose Pubes actually managed to kill me then. That's surprising-I guess I should be embarrassed that little wussbag took me out. _

_I want you to give Hyperion to Seth. He seemed to like it when I gave him gun blade lessons. He'll probably end up going to Garden eventually anyway. _

_I guess I don't really have any other shit to give away. Have Chicken Wuss' Balamb Girls Gone Wild calendar buried with me, ok? I know it must have bit the dust when Garden sank, unless he smuggled it out in his fucking pants or something, but trust me, he got another one. It'll be like one last fuck you from me to him._

_I guess I'm probably supposed to write something sappy, but you know I'm not any fucking good at that kind of thing. I love you, I guess. That's about all you're getting. Sorry I can't do better. And I know since I'm dead that it doesn't really matter if you fuck Pubes or not, but couldn't you pick someone else? NOT CHICKEN WUSS!_

_I'm sorry about all the shit I did. Well, not all of it, but a lot of it. _

_I love you, Instructor. Try to take the stick out of your ass once in a while._

_-Seifer_

She didn't cry this time, as she had the first sixty times she'd read the letter. After sixty, it got a bit easier to hear his voice echoing out each sloppy word in her head-a little like he was still with her, sprawled out on the sand beside her with his head in her lap, complaining about how annoying Zell was.

Her 80th reading brought a fresh wave of sobs, leaving her huddled on the floor of the children's old bedroom with Squall looking helplessly on, until finally Zell heard the commotion and rolled himself through the doorway etched in its silver ribbon strands of fresh moonlight. He'd braked his chair beside her and slid down out of it, arranging his useless legs straight out in front of him and then reaching over to hug her, holding her until the broken cries finally slowed, helping her wipe away her tears and then planting a brotherly kiss on her forehead. "It'll be ok, Quisty." he'd reassured her.

And it would be, she was slowly discovering. She would miss Seifer every day of her life, but at least now she realized she could survive his death. She hadn't been at all sure of that in the weeks following it.

Carefully, she re-folded his letter and stuck it back in her pocket.

She said a good-bye to each memorial as she walked past it-Seifer's first, then Matron's, Rinoa's, Bria's, Selphie's, and finally Irvine's. Quistis paused at his and reached down to brush sand from a small handful of flowers someone had set there-Zell probably. The friendship between him and the easy-going cowboy had always run deep, despite the surface teasing and Irvine's mischievous button pushing. Bria's death had torn Zell in half, but Irvine's had shattered what remained of him. He'd cried himself to sleep every night Quistis sat with him in the hospital after the pricey lawyers Cid had promised she and Squall bailed her out, and more than once she'd slipped over the crest of the final dune into this sheltered little valley to find him slumped in his chair in front of his friend's memorial, sobbing.

But eventually, glimpses of the exuberant young man began reappearing, and that was what kept her going most of all, through the trials and the nights of loneliness when she woke from dreams of Seifer into gut-curdling solitude.

Quistis could see Zell's smile now as she reached the top of the last dune between her and the beach, beaming like the sun overhead as he splashed paint all over the house, himself and Squall, mostly in that order. His laughter circled her cheerfully, and Quistis smiled as a draft of wind caught her hair and yanked out the scrunchie she'd loosely secured it with.

She watched it tumble down the beach toward the water, where it skipped briefly across a couple of waves before disappearing.

Zell's voice carried to her on another brief gust of wind, laughing hysterically; she heard him yell a moment later, followed by the squeak of wheels half-frozen with the caked-on grit of wet sand. "Dude, you can't do that! I'm in a wheelchair!"

She wandered toward the front porch and the empty pendulum of half-painted wood that rocked gently in the wind's grip. It was Zell's project-a side job that Squall had suggested, Quistis assumed, to keep the other man out of his hair while he painted the main cottage. He had gone to work happily on it for a few days; Quistis had helped him gather sheets of driftwood from the long winding skein of gold that was their own private expanse of beach, and for three days, Squall worked in peace while Zell hammered, sawed, and splattered bright blue all over himself.

Halfway into Zell's paint job, Squall fell off the ladder he'd left propped against one side of the house, and Zell abandoned his work to laugh at him as Garden's former commander picked himself grumpily out of the flower bed he'd crushed. It was a sufficient enough distraction to make him forget what he'd been doing prior to Squall's tumble, and from then on Zell's creation went largely ignored.

It was an adequate enough approximation of a swing, even if its angles jutted here and there a little messily, and the nail that tacked into place the board she draped her knees across caught on her jeans and stabbed her thigh. She swung it just a little-just a light press of her toes into the deck underneath, enough to ark it gently up toward the railing and the sun, shining down on her up tilted face like molten gold.

The wheels of his chair startled the ramp of plywood Squall had affixed to the deck, and the entire structure shuddered lightly just a few moments later, about half a minute into her quiet contemplation, shuttering Quistis' eyes in a light wince. She should maybe see to it that the deck was replaced as well-half-rotted with age and saltwater, it probably wouldn't stand up much longer to Zell's enthusiastic entrances.

She smiled at him as he rolled up beside her. He transferred himself from his chair to the swing beside her-he was getting good at that, smooth and natural, like he'd been doing it his whole life, and Quistis' heart dropped a little.

_He won't have to do it his whole life. The doctors said there's a very good chance he could walk again. _she reassured herself.

Oddly enough, Zell said nothing as he squeezed himself onto three narrow feet of sanded-down beach wood beside her, the focal point of his eyes converging somewhere out over the water, on two foot breakers and foam lines of seaweed and dead fish.

She watched his tattoo lift with his lip-she could see just the corner, just the half moon curve of his smile and one bright, long-lashed eye, partially veiled by the spidery bars of obsidian he blinked down over it.

When he reached over and grabbed her hand, she curved her fingers gently around his, sun-warmed and strong, and infinitely comforting.

For two undisturbed minutes, she listened to the ocean's unending roar and the creak of their cozy seat, quiet little pops of stressed wood that probably meant the swing would soon follow in the footsteps of the dying porch-strewn out across the sand in a little prayer circle of broken splinters around Squall, in the midst of it all and cursing.

"Quis," Zell said slowly at last. "You ever think you might find someone who can replace Seifer?"

She looked across the bare stretch of wood with its dividing line of cerulean to the furrowed ark of his brow, crinkled up in a million thought lines that ruined his smooth skin.

It wasn't a difficult question, but she had to think about it for a moment anyway. No one would ever _replace _Seifer; they might stand in as a poor replacement-the inexperienced understudy in the season's most important play-but there would never be anyone who could replicate that lightning strike passion of first love.

But she didn't think that was what he was asking, so she took a moment before replying. "If you mean could I love someone else, I'm not sure."

Zell scratched the back of his neck. "Well, what about Squall? You used to care about him that way."

He was frowning, and it looked so out of place on his handsome, happy face that she smiled and gently squeezed his hand. "That was a long time ago, Zell." Quistis said quietly.

"I know. I just don't want you to be alone forever."

It was just a whisper, but she heard it anyway, and her stomach dropped with her heart, in one roller coaster plunge that took the breath in her lungs with it, down into her feet where they tensed in her strappy white sandals, decorated in the random blue and white splotches of his sloppy painting.

It wasn't just her he was talking about; he was lonely-missing Bria, torn so fast from the new emotions she'd elicited in him that he wasn't quite sure just what they all meant and where they should go. They never had fit neatly into the labeled boxes of her own mind, Quistis recalled ruefully. Feelings like that went exactly where they pleased-particularly when they were attached to Seifer, who smashed all her boxes and her preconceptions and her carefully restrained sentiments like a vengeful child on a violent rampage.

"You'll find someone again, Zell." She touched his face with the back of her hand-softly but not intimately, just a fond caress between two friends. "You'll always remember her, but there will be someone again." _Not for me, though, I don't think, and not for Squall either. _He was Rinoa's forever-when she'd captured his heart it had been permanent; it had taken Quistis a long time to realize that, a long time spent quietly hoping and secretly dreaming and then finally, finally, at long last giving up, letting go for real. Her feelings for Squall had always been based on the idea of him, on the brooding intensity of his eyes and his lips, sealing inside all his aspirations and his secrets and his hopes, a puzzle box that she could never quite solve-

She had never loved the idea of Seifer; the painfully arrogant bad boy with a temper, the disrespectful screw-up so in love with himself that he could never quite care for someone who wasn't him.

The interior hadn't been nearly as similar to that sneering, preening façade as she'd always assumed.

Zell turned and frowned at her. "You have to find someone again, too, Quisty. You can't be alone the rest of your life."

_I'm not. _

She could see Seifer everywhere-laughing with Zell while they pelted a frustrated Squall with the impromptu missile launches of their shoreline discoveries-cracked shells and small chunks of driftwood, smooth pebbles and the occasional handful of moist seaweed they'd thrown when they were children. He sparred with Squall in front of the slow restoration of their childhood home, tracing the patterns of their warrior's dance with his bare feet and jeering.

And at night…at night he shared her bed, and the stagnant cold her mattress usually held each morning when she woke alone warmed under his body, tucked up against hers beneath her knotted covers.

But she didn't tell him any of that. Instead, Quistis gently disengaged her fingers from Zell's, stood, and set his hand lightly back on his lap. The kiss she laid on his cheek was tender, quick, and utterly chaste. "I'm all right with being alone, Zell. Besides, I'm not really; we have each other." She smiled as her eyes slid down the curve of peeling wood that was aging cottage siding, her eyes landing on Squall, still determinedly painting away, that ever-present forehead wrinkle of his now a faint, faint crease of premature age.

Then she walked quietly back into the cottage, shutting the door behind her and padding lightly into the sunny kitchen to start dinner.

* * *

He was sprawled at the edge of that rippling circlet of blue-black, under the shade of the never-ending network of tree branches that stretched in a latticework of interlocking wood overhead, forming a natural roof that kept the sun off his face.

It was the same place she always found him, waiting with a patience that he had never bothered to cultivate during life, wading out to each new body that bobbed motionless to the surface of that bruised water, always checking, always hoping, always dreading-the only way he could have her again was death now, and Rinoa knew he didn't want that more than he wanted to see her again.

Still, she watched him forcibly screw his features down into stoic nonchalance each time he realized it wasn't her, each time he realized that he would have to go on without her another second, another hour, another day, all slithering by with the viscous sluggishness that was the passage of time in this place, where days crawled by like years.

She wondered how long it had been for Squall. A few months? A lifetime? Had he married? Fathered children? Was he happy? That was what she wanted to know most of all-he needed someone there to smooth that perpetual scowl from his face, someone who would force him to use pencils with smiley faces and fluffy erasers and pink paint, so he could secretly smile at the ridiculousness of them while he put on his mask of slightly annoyed indifference.

He needed her the same way Seifer needed Quistis.

She slipped into the long grass ringing the pond she had once breathed in the first fluid hiccup of in-breath she had taken since Seifer pinioned her spine with Hyperion, and approached him carefully, trying not to startle him.

He'd known she was there, probably all along; his head came up slowly as she came closer, a stray hair fluttering over those eyes, the same ones that had thrilled her teenage heart like the swooning heroine of a bad romance novel, the same ones that had convinced her she loved him until she met Squall.

"What'cha doin'?" Rinoa asked brightly; she already knew, but he could usually be counted upon to supply an entertaining if snarky answer.

Today he apparently didn't have the patience. "The fuck do you think I'm doing?" he snapped. "Don't bother trying to get me to leave; that faggy cowboy already came by and did that."

Rinoa rolled her eyes. "Irvine's not gay."

Seifer grunted. "Coulda' fooled me."

He was always this way when it got really bad, when memories of Quistis wrapped themselves like a noose around his heart and pulled until his entire chest burned with the agony of it; she knew because reminiscences of Squall did the same thing to her, except Rinoa's feelings manifested themselves as lengthy heart to hearts with Selphie, and not mean-spirited gay jokes.

She sat down next to him, and together they watched in silence for a moment, until the next bodies made their grisly appearances, and Seifer resumed his duty of sorting them all, untangling limbs and hair and gently ballooning clothing.

This was the in-between of afterlife, the scales of justice that carefully weighed each soul and deemed it worthy or hopelessly mangled. The good ones, the ones not irreversibly shot through with putrefaction and darkness and sin got to continue onward, through hushed forestland into the shining white city beyond, suffused with a radiance like the gentle afterglow of love.

The others disappeared suddenly, in a boil of agitated water and thrashing black tentacles and the strident shriek of the damned.

Rinoa had watched Ultimecia go that way, with an ululating cry and one last whiplash of her pale, fragile body, the crepe paper sag of her real form reaching out the gnarled claws of its age-spotted hands for her knight one final time before vanishing under the surface.

Seifer had cried when he realized they weren't taking him, because someone had finally decided he wasn't too evil to save.

She'd watched him bent over on the same shore she perched on now, sobbing into the dirt and hiccupping Quistis' name, and some lingering prejudice, some last little kernel of uncharacteristic resentment, throbbing in her heart because he'd separated her from Squall, gave its last death sputter, and went out. When she gently slid her arms around him and laid her cheek on his muscular back, holding him, crying with him, he hadn't resisted, hadn't flinched away. He let her embrace hold him up until he could stand himself, and then he'd settled in to wait for the woman he loved with all the faithful tenacity Rinoa had always believed he was capable of.

She stood up as he made his way back to the shore, smiling gently, because the decision she'd spent his entire interment here wrestling was finally done, finally made up, the last sputtering cinder of her selfishness finally going out when she saw the look on his face-relieved and utterly, utterly devastated all at the same time, before he remembered to put his scowl back in place.

She could see Squall again-it was the last frantic bid of the corner of Rinoa Heartilly that was not pure and perfect and selfless, the part she had never wanted him to see but that he had found and loved anyway, and it begged her not to waste this last little spark of leftover power, the final piece of her that was still a sorceress even in death. It was the piece she had saved all this time, the one she had not used even after her own death, because a part of her knew she needed it for something more important, something that was more valuable even than her love for Squall Leonhart.

"Seifer."

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Irvine and Selphie making their way toward them, holding hands.

His head came up as she reached out to him. Her hand brushed the skin of his forearm, coated in the fine blonde down of his hair, muscled from years of ceaseless training, endless weapons drills and sparring rings and the machine piston jerks of bench-pressed weights. It was warm and firm and solid beneath her fingertips, and then, just like the rest of him, it suddenly wasn't there anymore.

* * *

He remembered…Rinoa's face superimposed over the sun with its lanky finger shafts of red-gold pushing their way down through the endless forest canopy of his death realm…Irvine's surprised "What are you doing to him, Rin?"…The short, annoying one's dress, cheerful yellow, like a second fucking sun behind the flickering strobe light black of his lashes, and…

And her pale soft hand on his forearm, cold-tipped where the fingers ended in her bitten-down, pink-painted nails-gentle and soothing and quietly persuasive, until he couldn't remember what the fuck he'd been doing, but he could see Quistis now, wearing her Instructor Look and making him smile-he could see the sunlit waterfall of her hair and perfect sky blue, that gradation of color that was so purely robin's egg it reminded Seifer of the artificial slash mark of acrylic oil in a painter's latest masterpiece-

And then he was falling. Through the shredded cotton veil of clouds that wrapped him in wintry condensation, shrink-wrapped tight around his body like a second dermis layer of skin, through star freckled midnight sky and bloody sunset and the dewy rose petal of early morning.

He clawed air like he'd scrabbled at Ultimecia's wall-the one she'd thrown up between his free will and her iron control, that long smooth expanse of unblemished marble without foot or finger holds, impenetrable as jail bars, blocking the sky and the sun and her smile-the one that was _his_, the one she used to give to Squall that now belonged to him, and if he couldn't fucking see it again, he was going to rip apart the world with his bare fucking hands-

Seifer landed without impact. There was no abrupt stop blow to his joints, just a shifting of scenery, from the kaleidoscope madness of his descent to nebulous mist haze and soft, soft rainfall. He was falling-and then he simply existed, on the shoreline of a familiar beach, the foam line of its first waves eating his boots just like he remembered, the moon-bright finger point of his childhood home squatting just where he recalled it.

"What the _fuck_?" he snapped.

And then he could see her walking through the mist toward him, and his heart stopped.

It was not the romance story sprint of a heroine returned to her hero's arms-just a leisurely stroll, her hands tucked into billowy white pants that rippled like angel's wings around her as she moved, her face upturned to receive the rain that turned her hair into rope cords of damp wheat. She looked…exactly the way he always saw her when he closed his eyes-the dead didn't sleep, but they could daydream, and she had always been his favorite subject, even as a mouthy student who imagined bending his teacher over her desk to liven his classroom jail sentence a little.

Someone had gut kicked him, he thought frantically as she approached innocently, obliviously-someone had fucking gut kicked him, and now he was just _standing _here blinking back the film that covered his eyes, gape-faced and useless, his hands hanging at his sides because he couldn't figure out what to do with them. Quistis would notice him any fucking moment, and how the hell was he going to survive it when her first, instinctual reaction was disgust? He couldn't curl up on the sand and die when she turned away from him, because he was already fucking dead-it felt a lot like being alive right now, and hurt just as much as the first fatal sting of Squall's weapon as it punched through his neck tendons and into the frail cord of his windpipe.

It had taken him a few seconds to die-that flash of instant that is too quick for the human eye to follow, when the executioner's blade incises it's first and final slit into skin and muscle and sinew, when he finally, finally belonged to himself again, just long enough to watch her see him die. Holding a dying Zell in her arms, wide-eyed and staring as Squall completed his fighter's lunge and Seifer lost his grip on his gun blade and the world and her blue, blue eyes…

It was just one more hammer blow to the myth of drawn-out closing scenes-death wasn't nicely prolonged so you could apologize to everyone you needed to and share a final, teary good-bye kiss with the woman you loved-it just fucking happened. You lived and then you didn't, and then the people you left behind just moved on, and you were nothing more than a fucking name on a slab of rock.

He probably wasn't even that. Traitors didn't get proper burials.

He touched her as she walked past, and when she didn't stop, didn't even notice the hand that passed right through her, the body that rippled apart and then came back together as she passed through it, Seifer wanted to drown himself in the ocean. Which was impossible, and fucking redundant, considering the fact that he was already dead.

What the fuck was this? What the hell was he doing here, when he couldn't touch her, couldn't hold her, couldn't tell her he was as goddamned fucking sorry as he'd ever been-what the fuck _was _this? Some divine, delayed punishment? He'd slipped hell once, but it had circled back around for him, and now he'd get to silently watch her live out her life without him, marrying someone who wasn't him, adopting babies that wouldn't spit up on him and dogs that would piss in someone else's shoes and not his-

Seifer chased her down the beach. _Goddammit, _look _at me_.

Quistis kept walking.

He kept going, kept following her, stumbling over some half-formed structure someone-probably Wuss-had built in the sand, and then he stumbled again, and nearly fell.

Everything had become solid under his feet. Shifting damp-packed sand and coiled streamers of slippery seaweed, and the smooth-worn hardness of the pebbles he used to throw at Chicken Wuss to make him cry.

_Quistis_.

He was terrified to say it aloud.

Maybe he couldn't-maybe the ground felt solid underneath him, but he still wasn't, just an ephemeral stalker ghosting longingly after her.

And maybe he could; maybe her name slithering its way free of his lips would snap that beautiful head up and around, and then he'd see horror and disgust and loathing contort those pretty features, and he'd finally know for sure what he'd suspected for so long.

She hated him. He had killed Rinoa and Irvine and maybe that annoying little twit that was always surgically attached to his side-he couldn't remember for sure, but he remembered spitting Rinoa on the end of Hyperion, her mouth flapping into the loose-jawed grimace of a puppet with its strings cut, and he remembered the swish of those doors, opening just wide enough to admit his blade, through the cowboy's lung and out the other side, dropping him like he'd dropped Quistis when he punched her hard enough to break her perky little nose.

It didn't sit quite right now, just a little off-center, a little less perfect.

He hated it, not because it detracted from her attractiveness, but because it was a constant, physical reminder of those raining blows he had ceaselessly pummeled her with, the right hook he'd use to bruise her jaw and then her mouth, the elbow he'd taken to her temple, once then twice, each subtle little twitch of Ultimecia's fingers jerking the invisible threads connecting them, while the part of him that was never quite unaware of who he really was and what this woman meant to him curled up in a corner of Seifer, and waited to die.

And then he realized he could see the imperfect tilt of her nose because she was looking at him.

She had turned completely around to face him, frowning, her hair hanging wet and loose around her cheekbones.

She wasn't wearing her glasses; it was an insignificant detail that suddenly stood out to him, because he couldn't bear to try and decipher the look on her face-it was something unimportant to concentrate on, something insignificant to focus all his attention on.

"Am I dreaming?" she asked him calmly, taking a step forward and then stopping.

"Fuck if I know."

The frown furrowed itself deeper.

He could taste his heart in his throat. "I miss you." Seifer whispered; it was the most heartfelt thing he'd ever said, and he watched surprise replace the frown-maybe he'd never said anything like this in her dreams before.

"What?"

His temper flared. "What do you mean 'what,' goddammit? I miss you, Instructor-I miss you so fucking much it hurts more than Leonhart cutting my fucking head off."

He watched her take another step, still with that inscrutable look on her face, and then her hand slid up to touch his cheek, so softly he could barely feel it-he froze like that, afraid the pressure might disappear, terrified she might just fade gently away back into the spirals of fog twirling up from the surface of the sea and twining loosely around them.

"I forgive you."

He blinked.

"It's what I told myself I'd tell you before anything else, if I ever got to see you again-even if it's just a dream."

He could barely swallow; something had tightened around his throat, and it was blurring his eyes, smudging blue and gold together in front of him in an indistinguishable shadow form of featureless nothing.

He wiped his eyes, because he wasn't going to spend this moment crying like a little bitch, missing out on every subtle little curve of the mouth and arch of the cheekbone and sparkle of those indelible eyes, the ones he'd gone to his death thinking about.

She'd dropped her hand, so he extended his.

Quistis smiled, and took it-and that smile, that soft little coil of the lips that used to belong to Squall and never to her damaged traitor of an ex-student, was the best fucking thing that had ever happened to him.

**A/N: I purposefully wrote the ending a bit vaguely; I didn't want to do a 'yay, Seifer comes back to life and omg they all lived happily ever after!' sort of ending, because I think that's unrealistic, but at the same time I was really reluctant to not give them a happy ending after everything they went through. So I'm leaving this one up to the reader to decide what really happened-is it just a really realistic dream, or was Rinoa actually able to send him back, and if so, was it for just one last moment between them so Seifer would know Quistis forgave him in spite of everything? Or does Seifer live again? (He's a little like the Energizer Bunny, or the Scream franchise-he just won't quit.) I hoped you guys all enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.**

**A/N 2: Sorry the first author's note looks a bit odd-I didn't realize it would edit out the name of the site; weird.**


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